


Heart of Stone, Heart of Flesh

by momebie (katilara)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Veterinarians, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-09-11 22:34:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9037640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katilara/pseuds/momebie
Summary: The elk appeared out of the shadow of the forest canopy as if materializing in mid-air. He was as tall as the moa, but also had massive antlers that reached up and tangled with the branches on the trees. His coat was a dusty chestnut color with a white starburst over his chest and smattering of white across his cheeks and nose. The elk leaned over the fence and bent his massive head, as if showing Adam deference. To Adam’s right, Destroyer knelt down on her front knees and dipped her nose into the grass. To Adam’s left, Ronan bent his head too, like he was about to say grace. When he spoke his voice was soft and low. “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”(Or, the one where Adam is a veterinarian and Ronan has dreamt up a whole menagerie of extinct/magical creatures.)





	1. In which there is curiosity.

**Author's Note:**

> It's the magical menagerie au! And the latest Big Bang entry ever to Big Bang! Apologies for the slowness on my end. I'll update the remaining chapters as quickly as I can. They're all written, I just need to edit them into some semblance of beauty.
> 
> All of the art is by [@purrsnicket](http://purrsnicket.tumblr.com/). The pieces will be added with each relevant chapter. Please tell her how lovely they are, because it's just going to get weird if I keep doing it.

The drive from Harrisonburg to Singer’s Falls was peaceful at six in the morning. It was too early for the roads to be full of other vehicles. It’d be another hour before the world fully awoke and all its inhabitants headed off to work or church or any other manner of interminable Sunday morning not-freedom. For now the road, and the whole of the landscape, was marked only by a heavy grey mist that gathered in the valleys of fields and hovered thick over the ponds. The sun was just now pushing its way over the horizon, the weak, yellow light a welcome sight after the past week of thunderstorms.

There was a calm in early mornings that Adam found hard to come by in other parts of his life. He cranked down the windows of the clinic’s truck and welcomed it, breathing in the sharp, moist air, thankful for the fog and the fleeting magic it seemed to lay over the world. He took a deep breath in and thought about what a big day it was. He exhaled and tried to calm his nerves.

He was certain he was being hazed. Adam had been working at the Czerny Veterinary Clinic for close to four months now, but this was his first week of solo farm visits. As the newest veterinarian he’d been put on rotation for handling their most difficult client for the next few months. The clinic’s owner and head vet, Noah Czerny, had assured him it wasn't a form of hazing. Adam wasn't sure he believed him.

When Adam asked why he hadn’t been taken out to the Lynch farm on one of his training runs if he was going to have to work with the guy alone, Noah said that there was no effective warm up for dealing with Ronan Lynch and that everyone had to learn to do it in their own way. Then he followed that up by saying that Adam had superlative skills handling ornery creatures and winked. It was the wink that had really set Adam on edge.

_You have the right temperament_ , Noah had said. _And you’re more than capable of handling anything that gets thrown at you._

That last part was probably true, at the very least. Adam worked hard to maintain an air of calm unflappability. It was one of the small ways in which he promised himself he would not be like his father. So far he had managed to keep himself out of situations that might necessitate any other temperament. Now here he was, being sent into one more or less blind.

More or less because he had no facts, but there were plenty of stories. Henry Cheng, who had been in Adam’s class in veterinary school and was starting at the Czerny clinic with him, had apparently been in high school with Lynch.

_So you know him?_ Adam had asked. _Shouldn’t you be the one on his service?_

In response to this Henry had laughed so hard he fell off his stool and needed to get ice for the elbow he banged against the floor.

There was apparently a never ending supply of horror stories surrounding the teen aged Ronan Lynch and Henry spent every spare moment for the next week relaying these to Adam with voices and pantomime. Henry Cheng, it seemed, was made of spare moments. Though, even Henry had to admit that the Lynch farm had the best looking and healthiest cattle of any client in their regular rotation.

That was the important thing, Adam figured. He hadn’t gone into veterinary training because he was great with people, and he had to assume one went into farming for much the same reason.

At 7:15 AM Adam turned onto the unmarked gravel driveway to the Lynch farm. At 7:17 AM he had his breath taken clean away from him. Every comment he’d heard about the loveliness of the place had been an understatement.

Adam parked his truck between a slate grey BMW and a plum tree and climbed out, closing his door quietly. It would have been a blasphemy to break the hushed beauty stretching out before him before he could fully enjoy it. The plum tree was heavy with fruit, even though it was too early in the spring for them to be this ripe. His fingers itched to reach up and take one, but it was hardly professional to eat someone else’s fruit without an invitation. He did place a hand against the tree’s trunk and use it as a tether to get his bearings in the sea of perfect green around him.

The closest building was an idyllic farmhouse that looked well-loved by time and environment. Its white paint glowed in the new sunlight. The shutters were painted a dark grey color that was chipped in the deliberate, artistic way you might find in a Norman Rockwell painting. There was a tilting car-sized shed off to the right of the house made of simple graying slats of wood.

From where he was standing the fields stretched out into forever, wide and lush and swimming in thinning mist. The five barns the property took its name from were painted in autumn shades of red and orange and dotted the fields and hills at even intervals like soldiers standing watch. Above it all the sky was purple and blue and felt somehow deeper than any sky Adam had ever seen. At the edges of the horizon the stars clung to the crowning daylight like dew.

Something inside of Adam popped quietly, like the pinging of the truck’s cooling engine. This place was perfect. It was the dream of every kid who grew up in the trailer parks surrounding his dying hometown. It had been his dream when he was young, before he knew how wide the world was and how wide a dream could be. He gave himself a moment to really feel that old want and then he neatly folded it up and packed it away, as he did with all of his wants.

He walked around the truck and pulled his quick med bag from the passenger’s side of the cabin. This time he shut the door hard, hoping to signal his arrival to anyone who might be working around the house.

He started up the lawn to the porch of the main house in long strides, wanting to appear confident and in control and not at all as nervous and small as he felt. He’d never been that great at first impressions, but he did believe that anything could be improved with practice, and he had a lot of practice meeting farmers and ranchers by now. He made it up the steps, across the porch, and knocked on the wooden frame of the screen door.

It took less than a minute for someone to open the door. The young man on the other side of it was broad with shoulder length curly blonde hair and deep dimples that manifested when he gave Adam a bright, polite smile. This, Adam thought, could not be Ronan Lynch. This young man did not look like the delinquent Henry had described. This young man looked like the sun itself had condensed into a person. The most unnerving thing about the young man was the small creature hovering over his left shoulder. If Adam didn’t know better he would have sworn it was a puffer fish.

“You must be the new vet,” the young man said. He pushed the screen door open and held out his hand to Adam. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Adam took the hand, which engulfed his own. “And you,” he said. “Are you Ro—?”

“Matthew!” another, deeper voice snapped.

Matthew and Adam both swiveled their heads toward the shed. There was another man coming across the field in long, quick strides. Adam’s stomach dropped. This man matched Henry’s descriptions of visible delinquency exactly. He was also, as Henry had managed to leave out, incredibly attractive.

Ronan wore black mud-caked boots, dark jeans, and a worn black leather jacket with no shirt underneath. He had a narrow face with sharp features and dark hair that was shaved down close to his scalp. As he got closer Adam could see the sweat clinging to his forehead and chest, showing that he’d already been at work for some time. He looked less like a farmer and more like a member of a 1980s punk army. The most unnerving thing about him, though, was the large black raven perched on his shoulder. It spread its wings for balance as he clomped up the steps, making him look momentarily like he had an armored collar. He stopped a few feet from Adam and looked him up and down with narrowed eyes. The bird let out a sharp cry and Ronan curled up his lip at Matthew in what Adam read as aggressive disappointment.

“What did I tell you about strangers?” Ronan asked. He nodded at the animal that was now flying erratically about Matthew’s head.

“It was nice to meet you,” Matthew said to Adam. If he was put off by Ronan’s harsh manner he didn’t show it. He merely reached up, cupped the creature in his hands, and pulled it down to cradle near his chest before disappearing back into the house.

“Stop staring at my brother,” Ronan snapped. He stomped back down the steps, stopping at the bottom to turn and glare impatiently up at Adam. “Well, are you coming?”

By the time Adam recovered from the shattered calm and jumped down the steps he had to practically jog to catch up. Ronan was taller than he was by a good couple of inches and all of that height seemed to be in his legs. They stalked across the fields and past the first barn to the second. When they paused outside of the burnt orange door the bird pushed itself off Ronan’s shoulder and flew away, its jerky movements mirroring its master’s impatience.

“I’m Adam Parrish,” Adam said, because he felt that ought to be the first thing he said to a new client. He held his hand out.

Ronan stared at it for a few seconds, his thin lips pressed together and his eyebrows furrowed. Then, without accepting it, he turned and slid open the door to the barn. It looked heavy, and he pushed his shoulder into the chipping wood and grunted with the effort.

“Don’t shake hands,” Ronan said finally, stepping into the barn. “Especially not since I know where yours have been.”

Adam gritted his teeth. He tried not to let his disappointment that this man was living up to every one of his terrible expectations get in the way of his professionalism. “Is it just the cattle today, _Mr. Lynch_ , or would you like me to check the goats as well?”

“Whatever blows your skirt up.” Ronan shrugged. “I think one of the nannies might be knocked up, though, so you might as well. They’re in a pen around the other side of the next barn. I trust you can find them.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

“Sure,” Adam said. He stared down at his feet for a moment, then he shifted his bag from one hand to the other and squared his shoulders. By the time he looked up to say more, Ronan was already on his way out. Adam seethed. “Asshole,” he muttered.

He put his bag down next to the cow nearest to him and placed his hand on her shoulder. She was calm and warm. Her coat was a bit thicker than usually found in Jerseys and her face was a bit broader, but she had beautiful, clear brown eyes and a strong, steady heartbeat.

“I guess you’re used to him, hey girl?” Adam asked, rubbing his hand down her nose. She blinked and flicked her ears in reply.

Adam made his way through the herd. They were all in good health and not due for a more thorough check up for a couple of weeks, so he took minimal notes for his report. In fact, the most remarkable thing about them was that, even though they had varied coloring and markings, they all had the same auburn splotch on their right shoulders. At first Adam had mistaken it for a brand of some sort, but then he realized it was in their coats.

There was no way, as far as he knew, for someone to engineer cow markings. Yet here stood eleven cattle with coats that he couldn’t explain. Maybe Ronan dyed them. That seemed like it would take a lot more work than simply branding them, but Adam thought it might be less painful to the animals. Still, it was a ridiculous assumption and he made a note to ask Noah about it when he returned to the clinic.

The goats were where Ronan said they would be, but the pen was not what Adam thought it might be. Instead of a small area fenced off with wire and wood it was about half the size of a football field and a veritable playground. The fence was about chest height and appeared to be woven out of sturdy wood planks. There was a corner of the enclosure slick with muck, but most of it was made of the same green grass as the rest of the fields and dotted with things like short jumping fences and large triangles for climbing. Adam had seen some expensive goat operations, but he’d never seen a place made exclusively to serve the comfort of the goats like this. These goats, he reckoned, were better outfitted for life than most people.

There were several short caws and he raised his eyes to see the raven circling above him. He felt rather obnoxiously like he’d just been chastened by a bird. _Stop dawdling and get to work_ , it seemed to say. The part of Adam that hated feeling subordinate chafed against this imagined chastening, but there was nothing for it but to do as the bird may have said. He entered the pen and got to work.

The sun was high in the sky by the time he finished up his work and headed back to his truck. The magic of the fog had long since burnt off and he could see clear to the mountains on the edge of the valley. He’d put away all of his supplies and now needed only to leave the paper invoice with a member of the household. He hesitated there, staring at the horizon, because he didn’t want to go toward the house again and cause more trouble, but he also didn’t want to have to hunt down Ronan Lynch on his own land.

After fifteen minutes Adam sighed and decided to split the difference. He walked toward the house, but instead of climbing the steps he snaked around the side of it. He came to the back porch and was surprised to find there were more pens beyond the house. Before he had a chance to see what they housed Ronan rounded the corner and almost ran into Adam.

“Where the fuck are you going?” he asked. He stepped forward, causing Adam to step back.

Ronan had changed from his jacket into a grey muscle shirt that was damp with sweat. It made him appear even more delinquent than before, displaying muscular arms and parts of a black tattoo sneaking up around his shoulders and neck. There were a series of leather bands around his left wrist and Adam had the fleeting thought that they might be what was left of a previous jacket.

“I was looking for you,” Adam replied, trying to maintain a collected tone.

“Oh, are you finally finished? Took you long enough.” He took another step forward, forcing Adam back again until he could no longer see around the house.

Adam took a deep breath and held out the paper bill, afraid of what he’d say if he opened his mouth.

Ronan snatched it from his hand and studied it. “Why are you giving me this?”

“Because you don’t have an email address on file,” Adam bit out.

“No,” Ronan said. “I mean, why didn’t you just leave it on the door like the other guy? Surely you talk to each other when you’re not here fondling my cattle? I don’t know why I pay any of you for anything.”

“Maybe because we’re the ones making sure they don’t all die?” Adam snapped.

“Really?” Ronan asked, voice low and dangerous. He held the invoice out in front of him and very close to Adam’s face. “You feed them, do you? You here with them twenty-four-seven to help when they fall or get trapped in some dumb situation? No, you just show up twice a month to take my money and my time.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Adam said.

The world narrowed around those words as soon as they escaped. Everything went silent and still in the half a second it took for Adam’s sense to catch up to his mouth. Ronan stared back him with wide eyes, seemingly as surprised as Adam felt. Adam figured if he was in for a penny he was in for a pound and let the anger coiling in his gut come spewing to the surface.

He batted Ronan’s hand away from his face. “If you’re so sure you could do this better, why don’t you?”

“Because it’s not my job,” Ronan spat. “I’ve got enough to do without worrying over every bit of breath exhaled on this farm.”

“Really? Because you just told me you’re the only one who does just that!”

Ronan squared his shoulders and snapped his head up like he’d been slapped. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s quite a lot of property!”

“Poor you,” Adam said with heavy sarcasm. “Life must be hard with so much bounty and so little heart.”

Ronan narrowed his eyes. He crumpled the invoice into a ball and shoved it into the back pocket of his jeans. “My heart’s not your concern, vet boy.”

“Sure,” Adam shot back, lowering his voice so that it held the same quiet danger as Ronan’s. “I only deal with creatures who have one.” Then he turned on his heel and stomped away with his heart pounding heavy in his ears.

He expected Ronan to call after him, but nothing came. He got into his truck and drove down to the end of the driveway before what he’d done really sunk in and his hands started to shake on the wheel. He’d been rude a client. He’d _cursed_ at a client. What if Ronan called the clinic? What if Ronan got him fired? Adam didn’t think Noah would fire him for a first offense, not when every other client unanimously saw him as being quiet and thorough like he wanted to be seen.

Maybe it would be for the best if Ronan called. At least it would probably get Adam pulled off his rotation. Ronan had seen Adam the way Adam loathed to be seen. It had taken less than fifteen minutes of actual face time with Ronan Lynch for Adam’s true colors to shine through and that made Adam even more uneasy than his imminent firing.

Sure, he needed his job. The student loans were coming due and it was the most well-respected and well-paying clinic in the state. If he wanted to move on with the life he had planned he needed this. But Adam had survived without money and respect before, he could do it again if he needed to. It was the other parts of his old life that he really wanted to escape and he’d come uncomfortably close to recovering some of them today.

Adam was angry with Ronan and angry with himself. He pulled his truck over to the side of the road along a green pasture with a low fence and the car that had been tailing him for the last five minutes blared their horn as they blew past. Adam held up two middle fingers toward the car’s receding back end and then punched the steering wheel a few times for good measure.

Adam hated this feeling more than he hated anything else in the world. He hated feeling like he was being controlled by his emotions instead of the other way around. He tried to breathe through it, but he knew it was going to be a few hours before he balanced back out, and maybe a few weeks before his career recovered. He was fucked.

~*~

Ronan did not call the clinic that day or the day after. For the next week Adam kept his head down and strove to make himself indispensable. Every morning he went in with an upset stomach, prepared to defend himself against any scathing comments Ronan Lynch could have left in his absence. Every day looked on the ringing phone with dread. Every evening he went home again, anxiety unrealized. It was the next Saturday before anyone even mentioned his visit to the Lynch farm and the comment came from a most unexpected quarter.

“You must be some kind of asshole whisperer,” Henry Cheng said.

Adam was leaning against the counter in the break room, reading the care history for an Amazonian parrot that he was due to sit in on an examination of later that day. Henry placed a cup of coffee on the counter next to Adam’s hip. When Adam didn’t take it Henry pushed it a little closer to him.

“I’m sorry?” Adam asked.

“Asshole. Whisperer.” Henry repeated. He punctuated each word with a rap of his knuckles on the counter top. “You will never believe the call I just overheard the big man taking.”

“Henry,” Adam said coolly. “You shouldn’t spy on Noah.” His stomach did a triple flip and then knotted itself up tight.

“It’s not spying if I just happen to hear his conversations from places I’m supposed to be.”

“And what possible reason could you have for skulking around a water cooler long enough to hear an entire call?” Adam lowered the history and eyed the coffee with light suspicion.

He could never quite tell what angle Cheng was working. Despite the fact that he styled his straight black hair in a sort of faux hawk that made him seem younger than he was, Henry was well put together and nice in an uncomplicated way that Adam didn’t trust. This probably said a lot less about Henry than it did about Adam himself.

Henry shrugged. “I saved that fish’s life and you can’t prove otherwise. Anyway, that’s not the important part. The important part is you worked some sort of magic out at the Barns and they’ve asked that you perform all of their visits for the foreseeable future.”

“We don’t see fish,” Adam replied. Then his brain caught up to the rest of what Henry had said. “Wait. What?”

Henry leaned in and clapped Adam on the shoulder. “That’s right, kid! You charmed the dragon! Day one even!”

“I’d rather slay him,” Adam grumbled.

So the call had come and gone without his termination. Somehow he felt even worse than he thought he would. He gave in and picked up the coffee, taking a long sip of it just to give his hands something to do.

Ronan Lynch _liked him_? That couldn’t be it. Ronan Lynch wanted to see him again to give him a proper dressing down or to try to humiliate him in some way. Ronan Lynch wanted personal retaliation, not Adam’s services. That had to be the only explanation. Well, fuck it. Adam never backed down from a fight, not even a passive aggressive war waged over the immaculate health of someone else’s cattle.

“Wouldn’t we all,” Henry said. “But he’s a high billing client. And you know what they say about your enemies. Hey, man, there’s an idea. How charming do you think you can be?”

Adam stared into his cup. “Not...very?”

Henry’s face split into a wide grin. “Ah, man. You’re not even trying right now are you? You’re gonna knock him dead.”

~*~

Adam found himself back at the Barns every two weeks after that. Dairy cows only needed checking in on that often so really, Adam only had to see Ronan twice a month. It was doable. More doable because Ronan made himself scarce whenever Adam was around. Adam usually dealt with Matthew now, though he hadn’t seen the weird flying creature again.

Even though he and Ronan hadn’t had a fight since that first day, Adam still gave himself a small pep talk every time he parked underneath the plum tree.

“You can do this,” he whispered to himself, staring up at plums that should have wasted past ripe and fallen off at least a month ago. “You’re good at your job and people who aren’t the actual devil like you.”

As if on cue Matthew came out onto the front porch and waved at him. Adam waved back and got out of the truck, going around to the other side to get his bag. This time there was an extra car in the driveway and he had to walk around it to meet Matthew near the steps. It was an obnoxiously orange Camaro that was older than he and Matthew put together. Adam thought the Camaro was kind of cool, but he tried not to linger near it. The last thing he needed was to give Ronan more of a reason to talk to him.

“Hey!” Matthew said. He took Adam’s bag from him and slung it over his shoulder as he turned to walk out to the cattle barn with Adam. “Any new cool stories for me?”

Adam scratched behind his ear and thought. “Someone left several owl chicks on the front porch. Noah found them when he was opening up last week. They were so sick and scaly they looked like little dragons.”

“Whoa, cool,” Matthew said. “Did they breathe fire?”

Adam laughed. “Not that I saw.”

He and Matthew had almost made it to the second barn when Ronan and another man came around the side of it talking loudly and gesturing angrily at one another. Adam lagged a step behind Matthew, not wanting to be spotted, but it was in vain. As soon as Ronan saw Adam he stopped talking abruptly and stared. The other man stared as well.

This newcomer was shorter than Ronan, with tan skin and tousled brown hair cut in a way Adam had only ever seen in magazine ads for expensive, clean cut clothing companies. He was wearing a pink polo shirt and khaki shorts and couldn’t have been more unlike Ronan Lynch if he tried. He cemented this impression by coming forward and extending his hand to Adam. He had a conspiratorial smile and Adam found himself feeling disarmed.

“Hello, you must be the new vet. Parrish, right? I’m Gansey.”

“Uh hi,” Adam said. “Yes, Adam Parrish.” He shook Gansey’s hand automatically and looked to Matthew for help. Matthew only grinned up at Gansey, reflecting his charm.

“Good, good,” Gansey said. He dropped his other hand on Adam’s shoulder. “Ronan’s spoken very highly of you.” This he said loudly over his shoulder, as if daring Ronan to disagree.

Ronan, for his part, scowled and flipped Gansey off.

Adam tried not to flinch away from the unnecessary contact. He watched Ronan, waiting for a reprimand of some kind, but Ronan only put his hands in his pockets and stared at the place where Gansey’s hand sat on Adam’s shoulder. Ronan’s eyes flicked to Adam’s and then away. His scowl deepened into a sharp grimace.

“Gansey, leave him alone and let him get on with it.”

“I definitely want him to get on with it, but I’m not going to leave him alone,” Gansey said. He turned back to Adam. “Is it okay if I watch you work? I’m fascinated by all of this.” He waved an arm vaguely toward the other barns.

Adam assumed he meant to indicate the actual workings of the farm, but he also felt that maybe this man too was fascinated by the nature of the land around them. He shrugged and used the motion as an excuse to inch out from under Gansey’s touch. “Sure. It’s nothing too exciting, as Matthew here can tell you, but I don’t mind.”

“He’s lying,” Matthew said. “It’s so cool.”

“Excellent! Ronan?” Gansey asked. He looked at him expectantly.

Ronan glared furiously at Gansey. The two of them seemed to have a silent conversation with the ever furrowing arch of Ronan's eyebrows. Gansey blithely waited until Ronan grunted, “I’m good. Thanks.”

“You’re anything but,” Gansey replied.

Ronan took a deep breath and shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “Whatever,” he said. “Come on, Matthew, this isn’t a circus.”

“But!” Matthew objected.

“No,” Ronan said. “Give him his shit and let’s go!” He waited for Matthew to hand off the bag and then he stalked past them and back up toward the house.

“Come tell me if anything cool happens!” Matthew said, and followed after his brother.

Gansey watched them go and tutted. “Bark’s worse than his bite, you know?”

“I’m sure I don’t,” Adam said dryly. He made his way to the barn door and placed his bag on the ground so he could shove it open the same way he’d seen Ronan do it. The door was curiously heavier than any other barn door Adam had ever encountered and he spent quite a bit of his time at the Barns wondering if all the buildings were equally as difficult to get into and what they might be hiding.

Gansey followed after Adam and retrieved his bag from its place on the grass. He followed Adam into the drowsy darkness. None of the cows even looked up from what they were doing. “So what do we do first, doc?”

The question put Adam on edge. It wasn’t that Adam wasn’t used to being observed. He’d had to be at the beginning of his training, and these days Matthew usually visited with him on his rounds at the Barns. It was that he wasn’t used to being looked at like he had all of the answers. Something about the open look in Gansey’s face made Adam feel like the man actually wanted to know, and also like he genuinely found Adam to be an interesting person. It was as if Gansey had been designed in a lab of good breeding and manners to make everyone else feel at home.

Adam didn’t trust it. He took his bag back and set it down so he could pull out the stethoscope. “Do you want to listen to a heartbeat?”

Gansey’s smile lit up his whole face. “Can I?”

Adam nodded. He put the earpiece on and approached the closest cow. He placed the chestpiece behind its left front leg and waited to hear the familiar beats. Once he could be sure that everything was in good working order he waved Gansey over and handed the earpiece to him while holding the chestpiece in place.

Gansey put the earpiece into his ears with a look of deep concentration on his face. Adam got the impression that Gansey was afraid of letting him down, which was ludicrous. Adam was no one to this man. He was barely someone to this man’s friend. Why should he care? It took Gansey a few moments of listening, but then his lips split back into his incorrigible smile and he beamed at Adam. He started nodding his head slightly in time with the heartbeats, as if he was listening to music.

After another minute Gansey removed the earpiece and handed it back to Adam. “Thank you,” he said. “That was really cool.”

Adam looped the stethoscope around his neck. “It’s not all cool,” he said. “Wait till we have to make them pee.”

Gansey grimaced. “You don’t.”

“Every one, every time.”

“I guess it’s not different than when I go to the doctor.”

“It’s not, really. Just that you can tell someone when you’re hurting or upset and they’ll probably understand you. These guys can’t use their words.”

Gansey considered this seriously as he scratched behind the cow’s ear. “Sometimes words don’t make a difference.”

“True,” Adam said, thinking of all the times he’d wish someone would just understand the things he couldn’t say. He wondered if Gansey was this effusive with everyone. It seemed like a trait that would be lost on Ronan Lynch’s stubborn surliness. He placed the earpiece of the stethoscope in and turned to rub his hand along the next cow’s warm, twitching flank.

Gansey followed along behind him as he worked. “I’m sorry about Ronan.”

Adam continued his check. “He’s an adult. You don’t need to apologize for him.”

“I know,” Gansey said. “But I’ve known him for a long time and I know what he seems like to new people. He’s not that bad.”

“He is that bad.” Adam pulled the stethoscope back down around his neck and turned to face Gansey. “And I reckon he’s that bad on purpose, which is doubly damning.”

Adam didn’t care that Ronan could be difficult. He himself could be difficult and had been told so by many of the people in his life over the years. What bothered Adam was that Ronan _wanted_ to be seen as difficult. He put effort into it. Adam hated feeling like he was being manipulated and Ronan’s intense disagreeableness reeked of a need to control how people saw him.

“But it’s not my place to do anything about it,” Adam said. “He’s not my patient, they are.”

Gansey brought his thumb to his lip and nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I’m just saying. He’ll never tell you that he respects you or that he thinks you’re better with the animals than anyone else who’s ever been out here, but he does. I just thought you should know it.”

“He can’t possibly know how good I am. He’s never stuck around to watch me work.

“He does.” Gansey shrugged. “But more importantly, Matthew does and Matthew likes you. That goes a long way with Ronan.”

The thought of having been watched, _spied on_ instead of just supervised, made Adam feel more uncomfortable than anything had in years. “Well now I know. Your mission is complete,” he said. “You can let the tyrant know.”

Gansey laughed, shallow and breathy. “I can’t. He’d skin me alive if he knew I’d said that to you.”

“Ah, it’d be a shame to lose that tan,” Adam said.

Gansey tilted his head back and laughed louder this time. It startled a pair of pigeons who had been hiding in the rafters. They flew from one side of the barn to the other.

“I like you, Adam Parrish,” Gansey said. “I think we’ll keep you.”


	2. In which there is discovery.

Adam had Monday off, but he was at the clinic at 7:45 in the morning anyway. Noah usually uploaded the weekly schedules when he came in at seven and then immediately started calling suppliers and taking care of admin leftover from the weekend back in his office. The other vets and support staff wouldn’t show up until eight at the earliest, which meant Adam had fifteen minutes to get the computer at the main desk running, get his schedule off of it, and get out before anyone noticed he was there.

He could call in for it, or even have his schedule emailed to him, but he’d learned early in his life that his responsibilities were his alone and he couldn’t trust anyone else to take care of them for him. If there was a typo in what was given to him and he showed up late or not at all, that was on him. The only thing Adam hated more than letting people down was the small talk involved with being seen at work when he wasn’t working, so here he was, silently cursing at the computer for taking too long to wake up and compulsively checking his watch. 7:51 AM. Why was the damn thing so slow?

At 7:57 AM Adam folded over the piece of paper he’d scribbled his schedule onto and stood up to sneak out again, only to turn away from the computer and find himself face to face with Noah Czerny himself. Noah looked very pleased to see Adam, or possibly pleased with himself for having caught him. He had a grey bird with a peach belly perched on his arm.

“Well,” Noah said. “I knew we had a Monday morning dormouse.”

“Just picking up my schedule, sir. I’ll get out of your hair right now.”

“Don’t leave on my account.” Noah gave Adam a lopsided grin and brushed a mess of blond bangs out of his face with his free hand. “I’m glad it’s you, actually. Otherwise I was going to have to send this beauty back without having completed her mission. She brought this for you.”

Noah pulled a tightly folded bit of lined paper out of his pocket. He held it out to Adam who took it and studied it, turning it over in his hands. It was shaped like one of those paper footballs that people got in trouble for passing in class back when Adam was in school. Not that Adam had ever experienced such a thing first hand. No one had ever tried to pass him a note.

Noah set the pigeon down on the desk and it hopped close to Adam. It tilted its head up and cooed at him. Adam stared down at it, confused. He could swear it was a passenger pigeon, but he had to be wrong. Those had been extinct for a hundred years.

“Is that a—? How did it—? How do you know this was for me?” Adam asked, finally settling on the most important question.

Noah clasped his hands behind his back and bobbed up onto his toes. “Yes, by air obviously, and I know the pigeon. You’re the only one who has dealings with her home farm currently.”

“You’re sure it’s from the Barns and not the Smithsonian?” Adam set the note down on the desk and the impossible pigeon rushed up to shove it back to him with its beak. The note toppled over the edge and onto the ground. The pigeon squawked at him. Adam sighed and bent to retrieve it. “Does this mean they’ve sent birds to people before? Why doesn’t he just get an email address like everyone else?”

“I have long since stopped wondering why Ronan Lynch does or doesn’t do anything,” Noah said. “It’s like wondering about the weather. Hoping it won’t rain doesn’t actually shift the clouds.”

“Why did you send me into the storm to begin with?” Adam grumbled.

“Every growing plant needs a good watering.”

It was very like Noah to make odd, romantic statements. He was almost ten years Adam’s senior, but he had the most playful attitude and most optimistic outlook on life of anyone Adam knew. Adam wasn’t sure he’d ever seen the man angry or upset, subdued maybe, but not outright out of sorts. It was comforting most days. Today Adam just felt like Noah was another part of the machine of the world out to get him. Everyone was happier. Everyone understood more.

Adam turned the note over once more without opening it. There was an odd feeling in the pit of his stomach that wasn’t quite fear and wasn’t quite excitement.

“You shouldn’t worry so much about everything,” Noah said. “You especially shouldn’t worry about Ronan Lynch. He hasn’t murdered you yet, has he?”

Adam shook his head. Ronan hadn’t even snapped at him in the last month. Something about Adam having Gansey’s approval as well as Matthew’s had smoothed out Ronan’s opinion of him. Ronan still didn’t spend time with Adam, but he didn’t antagonize him when he did see him either, which was a start.

“I’ve known Ronan Lynch and his family for longer than I’ve had this practice,” Noah continued. “They have prize winning animals who never win any prizes because they’ve never been entered into competition. They make half of what they could make off the animals themselves because they sell what they do produce at half cost to local folk. Sometimes Matthew comes down in person with the payment and things he bakes from recipes that were his mother’s, when she was alive. I’m not saying this makes Ronan a saint or that it even makes him palatable. Goodness knows he and I have had words on occasion, but those boys have been orphans for going on ten years now. They keep to themselves for their own reasons, and they open up for their own reasons too.”

Adam’s brain caught on the word orphan and he thought about how many times over the course of his young life that he’d wished he was an orphan. It was never a thought that made him feel charitable, but it did sometimes grant him a small amount of dawning, possible relief. Now it just made him feel disgusted with himself. He hadn’t spoken to his parents in years, but he could if he ever needed to, and that made all the difference.

“That’s the real reason I put you on the Lynch farm rotation instead of anyone else.” Noah nodded meaningfully at the note in Adam’s hand. “You also keep to yourself for your own reasons, sneaking in and out of here like you think I don’t see or want you here, or like you think you don’t belong. I thought you might understand.”

“Oh,” Adam said. When Noah put it like that it seemed to make a world of sense. “If you know so much about them, do you know why he’s such an asshole?”

Noah laughed. “Even if I did, some stories are better told by the people who own them. Don’t you think?”

The pigeon cooed at Adam reproachfully and pecked at the hand holding the note. “Ow! Fine, fine.”

The pigeon chirped at him, indignant, and swiped at him with its foot. Adam moved his hand quickly out of reach and unfolded the paper. The inside message was written in a messy scrawl and he had to squint and tilt his head to read it.

_next Sunday. stay late.  
can you??_

The words ‘can you’ were tilted up just slightly, as if they had been added as an afterthought. It wouldn’t surprise Adam in the least if Ronan had initially planned to send the missive as an order or statement of fact and had been made to change it by either Matthew or Gansey. They were both constantly making excuses for Ronan’s moods and trying in vain to keep his actions in line.

“He’s not big on words, is he?” Adam asked.

“Hasn’t been as long as I’ve known him,” Noah replied.

The pigeon watched Adam intently with its head tilted, waiting.

“Um,” Adam said. “How do I…?”

“Send him a note back, of course.”

Adam pulled a bright pink sheet of paper off the receptionist’s notepad and scribbled _’sure’_ onto it. He folded it in half, thought for a moment, and then unfolded it and wrote ‘ _will be free all afternoon_ ’ before folding it up again and holding it out for the pigeon.

As if that was all it had been waiting for, the pigeon hopped off the desk and flew around the room a few times, searching for a way out. Noah moved to open the door, but it opened before he got there and the pigeon flew through it just as Henry came in. Henry ducked and had to scramble to hold onto the cups of coffee he had nestled in their little cardboard carrier.

“What the actual heck?” Henry said, as he handed one of the cups over to Noah. “Parrish, what are you doing here? If I’d known you were coming in I’d have gotten one for you too.

Adam ignored him. He opened a browser on the computer and started frantically typing into the search engine. “I swear to god,” he muttered. “If that wasn’t a passenger pigeon I’ll eat Henry’s sunglasses. The really big obnoxious ones.”

“Hey!” Henry brought his coffee cup up to protectively cover the expensive Gucci sunglasses currently nestled in his hair. “Find your plastic intake elsewhere, chief. Those have been extinct for fucking ever.”

Noah turned and looked out the large window that took up most of the front wall of the clinic. “If you don’t rely too heavily on fact,” he said softly, “the world can be full of wonders.” 

~*~

As had become their ritual, Matthew greeted Adam the next Sunday and followed along behind as he checked the animals. Adam had learned early on that Matthew liked to talk and was content to talk about just about anything as long as someone would respond. They were discussing the many possible merits of being able to talk to animals as Adam finished up with the goats.

“You’d know what they wanted to eat,” Matthew said. “It must get boring to them, having to eat the same old hay and oats.”

“What if they only wanted to eat things that were bad for them like people do?” Adam asked, stepping out of the pen and closing the gate behind him. He wiped his hands on a rag he had over his shoulder and then used the edges of it to mop some of the sweat off his forehead. They were deep into one of the hottest summers on record and unfortunately there didn’t seem to be a sign of the heat breaking anytime soon.

“So,” Matthew insisted. “They deserve to be happy too!”

“I would never argue that,” Adam said. “But I also wouldn’t give an ice cream cake to a goose.”

“What if it was the goose’s birthday?” demanded Ronan’s gruff voice.

Adam whipped his head around to see Ronan coming around the corner of the nearest barn. He was in his usual uniform of black jeans and thin grey t-shirt and holding his hands clutched close to his stomach. He approached them slowly and stopped a few feet away from Matthew. When he opened his hands a purple streak zipped through the air and bounced off Matthew’s cheek.

“Ah, buddy!” Matthew laughed and reached up to cradle the creature to the side of his head. “I’m so excited you get to meet Adam, he’s great!”

It was several moments before Adam could get a good view of the thing and see that it was the same purple creature he’d spied over Matthew’s head on that first day. He couldn’t decide if this made him more or less crazy than he’d been worrying that he was, because it was definitely a puffer fish and it was definitely not in an ocean. It was just as impossible a creature now as it had been then.

“Does this mean we’re showing him the rest?” Matthew asked, eager.

Ronan nodded. “Go and get Destroyer out of the house, would you?”

Matthew yelped and sped away. The fish bobbed along happy and unpuffed in his wake.

Ronan put his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and stood there quietly. Adam could almost physically feel the pressure of his presence, even though he was a good six feet away. He supposed Ronan was waiting to be called out on the return of the fish, but Adam had more pressing impossible things to call Ronan out on.

He dropped the rag on top of his bag and crossed his arms, putting himself on the defensive. “A passenger pigeon?” he asked. “You do know phones are a thing, right?”

Ronan shrugged. “Didn’t have your number.”

“You have the clinic’s number. I know you do,” Adam shot back. When Ronan remained unphased and uninclined to respond or defend himself Adam tried a different tack. “I’m not a servant you can just summon, you know.”

Ronan shrugged again, using only one shoulder this time.

Frustrated, Adam kicked at the fence with the heel of his shoe. How did anyone in the world put up with Ronan Lynch? Even when he wasn’t being overtly antagonistic, he was still an impossible shit.

“I’m surprised you knew what it was,” Ronan said.

“Ronan,” Adam snapped. “I’m a veterinarian. It’s literally my job to know what animals are. And besides, it’s not like they were some rare bird. There used to be flocks of them so large it would take hours for them to pass.”

“Fourteen,” Ronan said. “It’s on record that at least one flock took fourteen hours to pass over a town. No wonder people started shooting the fuckers. Can you imagine the shit they left behind?”

Adam tilted his head, taking this information in. It was the most words Ronan had ever said to him in one go that weren’t being shouted or used to piss Adam off. Adam took a deep breath to smother the laugh that threatened come up. “Is that why you have one? Secretly breeding a new flock to wreak havoc on your enemies?”

“I prefer a more direct route with my enemies, and no, I’m not breeding a flock. She’s the only one. There’s only one of all of them.”

“All of what?” Adam asked. He leaned forward and then rocked back again, making a poor attempt to hide his interest in where this bizarre half-conversation could possibly be going.

A shadow flew across the two of them and then the raven swooped down and landed heavily on Ronan’s shoulder, its claws finding the holes already torn into the fabric of his t-shirt. Ronan reached up and stroked its beak.

“Weird pets,” he said. “Most of them were for Matthew, but Chainsaw’s always been mine.”

“You named it Chainsaw?” Adam asked, incredulous.

The bird squawked at him in admonishment.

“I named _her_ Chainsaw,” Ronan said. “I don’t know. It seemed bad ass when I was seventeen.”

“You still think it’s bad ass, don’t you?”

Ronan grinned at him, crookedly. “Come along, Parrish,” he said, and then turned on his heel and started to walk around the back of the nearest barn and toward the main house.

Ronan’s assumption that Adam would just come when called rankled Adam, but he had told an extinct bird that he would be free this afternoon, so it wasn’t as if Ronan was presuming his attendance out of hand. As always, there was no winning if you weren’t a Lynch. Adam sighed, picked up his bag, and started after Ronan. He had to take long strides to catch up. Adam still wasn’t sure Ronan was capable of moving in a way that wasn’t an angry stalk or a flat out run.

The main house looked picturesque against the deep blue of the early afternoon sky. The yard behind it sloped gently down until it met the treeline some several hundred yards away. The space in between was filled with outdoor pens, raised hutches, and small huts and stables. There were many more than he’d spied that first day. Some of them were little more than sheds, but others were set up with long runs like the goat pen.

As they rounded the edge of the house a large dog, no a wolf, scrabbled down the steps of the back porch and launched itself at Ronan. He leaned his shoulder into the collision to keep from being thrown off his feet. Chainsaw was knocked from her perch in the action and she flapped up and away, cawing at them angrily before flying off to land on the grey banister that circled the porch.

The front paws on Ronan’s shoulders were almost the size of dinner plates. On his own, Ronan could cut an intimidating figure with his height and the breadth of his shoulders, but the wolf was so large it made him look like a child as it licked at his face. It tilted its nose down to press its forehead to Ronan’s and for a moment the two of them seemed to be communing. Adam wondered if Ronan couldn’t somehow speak to animals and if he was any more polite with them than he was with people.

“Down you monster,” Ronan said gently, and pushed at the wolf’s body. It fell back to all fours and then approached Adam, tail wagging.

“Destroyer, I’m guessing,” Adam said.

“The one and only,” Ronan replied. “And thank god. You wouldn’t believe how much a dire wolf eats. You can pet her, she won’t bite.”

_I’m still not sure you won’t bite_ , Adam thought, but he reached out and gingerly patted at the top of Destroyer’s head. She responded by happily licking at his hands and nudging her massive nose into his crotch. He danced back a bit and heard Matthew laughing.

“Leave your bag here by the house,” Ronan said. He nodded at the steps and then started down the yard. Destroyer left Adam alone and trotted along after Ronan, massive tail swinging back and forth like a threshing scythe.

Matthew met Adam at the foot of the steps and took his bag from him. He ran it up to leave by the screen door. When he came back he jumped over the last three steps entirely and grabbed Adam’s wrist to drag him after Ronan. Adam flinched away from the touch on instinct and Matthew let go immediately, a worried look on his face. The fish flying around his head puffed up a little.

“Sorry,” Adam said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Just not used to being grabbed.”

Matthew nodded and the fish deflated again. “When you have brothers you get used to it.”

“Brothers plural?” Adam asked.

Matthew ignored the question. “Come on then!”

The fish led the way with Matthew following close behind and Adam bringing up the rear. By the time they got down to the first large pen Ronan was standing on the lowest rung of the fence and holding a plum out over the edge of it. There was a small stable like building attached to it. Adam watched the dark doorway along with the other two and waited.

“Come on out, you pissy mare!” Ronan called.

“Ronan,” Matthew chided. “Be nice to Amalthea.”

“Are all of your animals girls?” Adam asked. “Why is—”

There was movement at the door to the stable and Adam’s question got subsumed by wonder as an honest-to-god unicorn stepped through it. It was tall with a mottled grey coloring on its coat, a silver horn, and greying beard falling from its chin. It held its head high in the air as if to show Ronan that it didn’t answer to anyone but itself. It meandered over and took the plum from his outstretched palm all the same.

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

Matthew climbed up onto the fence next to Ronan. He reached out and patted the unicorn’s neck. It stepped closer to nuzzle at his shoulder with its mouth. “Most of them are girls,” he said.

“What did you do to it?” Adam asked.

He leaned forward and tried to find the place where the horn had been attached to the horse. Adam genuinely liked Matthew, and he was maybe warming to Ronan, but he would call animal control so fast it would make their heads spin if he thought an animal had been hurt for this farce.

“Stop staring at her,” Ronan said. “I didn’t do anything. That’s just the way she was made.”

“Made how?” Adam demanded. “Is this some Doctor Moreau shit?”

Ronan barked out a laugh. “You tell me, vet boy. How are babies made?”

“Ronan,” Adam said, flustered and hoping he didn’t blush. “This isn’t funny. You could get into a lot of trouble for mishandling animals. Especially rare animals. How did you do this?”

Ronan waved his hand and started to walk away from the pen. “I’m not mishandling shit, and if I told you I’d have to kill you.”

“Is that why you keep them?” Adam asked. “To get rid of the bodies?”

“It’s the perfect crime,” Matthew said. The unicorn licked at his hair. He pushed its face away gently. “No one would believe someone had been eaten by a unicorn.”

The unicorn seemed to get bored with nipping at Matthew. It turned and ambled back toward its stable. Matthew hopped down from the fence and followed after Ronan. There was nothing for Adam to do but see how deep this went.

By the time he caught up to them Ronan had entered another good sized pen with a smaller stable like structure in its corner. He opened the door and ducked his head in. There was a series of honks and then Ronan backed out again, followed by a large bird. It was squat and shaped like a long-necked kiwi bird. With its neck extended it stood heads taller than Ronan and its midnight blue plumage was tipped with gold. It stretched and let out another slur of honking noises. Then it did a few laps of the pen around them.

“What the fuck is that thing?” Adam asked.

“It’s a moa,” Ronan said.

“More of what?”

“No, it’s called a moa,” Matthew said, laughing so hard he bent over with the force of it. He gasped, trying to catch his breath. “It’s from New Zealand.”

Matthew ducked into the shade of the stable and the other two followed. They stood together watching the bird parade about and ruffle its feathers.

“Why is it here?” Adam asked. What he really wanted to know was if Ronan had a permit to have such a thing here, but he new it was futile to ask.

Matthew grinned at him. “Because I didn’t want the dodo to get lonely.”

As a statement on its own it made little sense, but Adam felt like they had left sense behind several miles back at this point. He looked between the brothers, trying to find the joke. All he saw was the look of complete and utter adoration for Matthew on Ronan’s face. Adam had never seen Ronan look anything close to happy or content before. It made him look like an entirely different person.

Adam liked Matthew Lynch. He suspected it was impossible to not like Matthew Lynch. Matthew was as likeable as his brother was unlikeable, except that he put no effort into being liked, he just was. He laughed a lot and smiled even more. He asked questions for everyone and he seemed genuinely interested in knowing the answers. Anytime Ronan started a fight Matthew smoothed it over.

Adam had seen this at work. Not just between Ronan and himself, but between Ronan and Gansey as well. Adam hadn’t given much thought to it, assuming the brothers to just be different sorts of people, as siblings sometimes were. What hadn’t occurred to him was how much Ronan seemed to need Matthew to be the one who was made of light. How Ronan’s moods might be rendered somewhat understandable when filtered through Matthew as a lense.

As if he’d heard Adam’s thoughts, Ronan shot Adam a questioning look and his face closed up again immediately. His eyebrows furrowed and the line of his mouth straightened out. Still, Adam had seen it. Adam had seen the glowing ember of love in Ronan Lynch and that made him just a little more palatable. Adam wanted to know just a little bit more about him.

“What?” Ronan snapped.

Adam shook his head and looked away.

The bird meandered over to where the three of them stood just inside of the stable door. Adam reached his hand out slowly to see if the bird would let him touch it. His finger was only a centimeter away from the bird’s long, graceful neck when another voice called out Matthew’s name. The bird danced away, startled. 

Adam turned his head in time to see Matthew’s fish puff up large and start to float away. Ronan reached out and caught it with ease. He held it close to his chest, fingers resting gently on the spines. The touch was in direct contrast to the instant anger that sparked in his hard set face.

“Declan,” Matthew whispered to Adam.

“Matthew!” the voice called again. “Let’s go! We’re going to be late!”

The three of them stood in silence in the stable and listened as heavy footsteps crunched their way through the grass and mulch of the back yard. Finally a well-dressed man came into view, looking this way and that. When he spotted them he turned and strode toward them with purpose.

“Matthew,” Declan said, looking him up and down with obvious disappointment. “We’re going to be late. Let’s go. Go put on some good shoes at least.”

“Okay, sorry Declan!” Matthew jogged away, off toward the house.

Declan frowned and looked Ronan up and down as well. “Why wasn’t he ready? Don’t you pay attention to anything I tell you?”

“I really try not to,” Ronan said. The fish in his hands flapped its small fins against the air in vain.

_Ah,_ Adam thought. _Brothers plural._

Upon first look Declan and Ronan seemed to come from entirely different broods. Declan was immaculate in his iron creased slacks, button up shirt, and tie, while Ronan was rumpled and looked like someone you’d find skulking around outside of a strip mall. Declan carried himself with his back straight and his chin held high, as a man does when he’s used to being respected. Ronan hunched a bit, in spite of his swagger, and did not seem at all interested in any respect the world had to offer.

However, the two were obviously related. It was in their jawlines and the intensity of their gazes. They both had the same broad shoulders as well, which seemed to be the only thing they shared with Matthew. It occurred to Adam that perhaps Matthew was as bright as he was because he had to balance out twice the dark. Neither of the elder Lynch brothers seemed inclined to entertain Matthew’s level of innate optimism.

“Your damnation is your own business,” Declan spat. “But at least let Matthew have a chance.”

“You’re right,” Ronan said, curt. He continued to hold on to the puffer fish, which Adam felt undercut the menace in his words quite a bit. “My damnation is my business.”

Adam, who had lived and breathed family disputes for as long as he could remember, felt extremely uncomfortable being privy to them when they weren’t his own. He coughed quietly to remind the brothers that they weren’t alone.

“Who are you?” Declan asked, not taking his eyes off Ronan.

“Adam Parrish,” Adam said. “I’m the vet.”

Declan gave in and finally acknowledged Adam’s presence. His frown deepened. “You taking care of the menagerie?”

“The what?”

“The menagerie,” Declan said. He raised his arms to indicate the stable and the land beyond. “My brother’s ridiculous folly. This irresponsible display of colossal stupidity. Jesus, Ronan, it might actually be more stupid of you to share this with someone from outside the family.”

“No,” Adam said. He felt like there was a lot Declan was leaving unsaid and that it was most certainly far more offensive than what he did say. “I’m taking care of the cows and the goats.”

“So he has no business back here at all then,” Declan said to Ronan, as if talking to Adam directly wasn’t worth his time.

“Declan,” Ronan growled. His whole body tensed, ready for a fight.

Adam was afraid they would come to blows. He was even less comfortable with other people’s violence than he was with their familial disagreements. He took one step back, and then another, trying to get out of the growing circle of ire that emanated from the brothers. On his third step back he bumped into Matthew, who had returned from the house.

Matthew now wore a button up shirt, chinos, and a pair of saddle oxfords. He placed a hand on Declan’s shoulder and Declan seemed to immediately unravel. His posture relaxed and he leaned away from Ronan.

“I’m glad you came, Dec,” Matthew said. “Let’s go. Ronan, take care of Merlin until I get back!”

Declan leveled one last menacing look at Adam and then sneered at Ronan. “Yes,” he said. “Take care of your mess, Ronan.”

With one final wave from Matthew, both of them were gone.

Adam watched them go, feeling some of the tension dissipate as soon as Declan rounded the corner of the house and was no longer in sight. “I see friendliness runs in the family,” he observed.

“Declan’s an asshole,” Ronan said, without a hint of irony. He rolled his shoulders and tilted his neck to either side, cracking it.

“Do you need someone to look after this?” Adam asked. “Is that why you showed me?”

“What?” Ronan asked. He pulled his eyes away from the space where Declan’s retreating back had been and studied Adam thoughtfully. “No. I showed you because, I—they take care of themselves.”

“Then why?”

Declan had been right, loathe as Adam was to admit so, since he barely knew anything about the man and what he did know he didn’t like. It was irresponsible to share this with someone who wasn’t a part of the family. Adam had become a part of the workings of this place sure, but that was out of necessity. Matthew trusted him as a matter of course, but that was because Matthew was trusting. Surely Ronan couldn’t think of Adam as important enough to share a secret of this magnitude with.

Yet he had, which was a fact that Adam couldn’t quite manage to wrap his brain around. It was likely that Ronan hadn’t thought of a reason for sharing this at all and had just done so on a whim, buffeted to folly as he sometimes was by a rare good mood. Adam found unpredictability uncomfortable and really did not like it when the people around him did things without thinking. It was a quirk of disposition that gave his flimsy sense of patience a lot of exercise on the Lynch farm.

Instead of answering Adam’s question, Ronan thrust the deflating puffer fish at him. “Hold on to this until it’s small again.”

Adam took the fish gingerly, being careful with its spines, because he didn’t know what else to do.

“Come on,” Ronan said, and he left the stable.

Adam spared one more look for the moa, curled up now in a shadowy corner and seemingly content to stay there. Then he followed after Ronan, gently closing the door behind him.

Destroyer greeted them excitedly as they exited the pen. She loped along behind as they made their way through the clutter of pens and sheds in the back yard and down to the forest’s edge. Adam felt her wet nose on his elbow as she nudged him, demanding to be pet. He shrugged down at her, and held the fish up to show that his hands were full.

By the time they reached the treeline the puffer fish was curled up in Adam’s palms and seemed to be asleep. He experimentally held it out in front of him and let go. It floated there at shoulder height, its mouth opening and closing in silent, bubble-less snores.

“It’ll stay there,” Ronan said. “It only floats away when it’s puffed up. I once followed it for close to a mile to get it back. Matthew followed me the whole time cyring. Of course, since he was upset it didn’t come down. I had to climb a tree and go up to get it.”

“Of course,” Adam echoed.

“Because it’s his anxiety fish,” Ronan said, matter of fact.

“His anxiety fish.” Adam pinched himself on the arm to make sure he hadn’t accidentally fallen asleep on the job. It made a whole lot more sense that he might be currently snoozing in the goat pen, instead of being licked by a dire wolf and staring at an aerial fish.

“Yeah, anyway. To answer your earlier question, most of the animals are girls. The only males are Merlin there, and Ezekiel.”

“What’s Ezekiel then?” Adam asked. “A brontosaurus?”

“Well,” Ronan said. “Not quite.”

There was a sound of cracking branches as something lumbered toward them through the forest. It sounded large, whatever it was. Adam leaned back on his heels, getting ready to run. He half expected it to be a stegosaurus or something equally as ludicrous, but what stepped right up to the outer fence was more breathtaking than he thought even a fully realized dinosaur could be.

The elk appeared out of the shadow of the forest canopy as if materializing in mid-air. He was as tall as the moa, but also had massive antlers that reached up and tangled with the branches on the trees. His coat was a dusty chestnut color with a white starburst over his chest and smattering of white across his cheeks and nose. The elk leaned over the fence and bent his massive head, as if showing Adam deference. To Adam’s right, Destroyer knelt down on her front knees and dipped her nose into the grass.

To Adam’s left, Ronan bent his head too, like he was about to say grace. When he spoke his voice was soft and low. “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”

Adam didn’t know what he was quoting, but the thought it sounded quite biblical. If that was the case it was hard to believe there was much damnation waiting for someone who could pull Bible quotes out of nowhere for special occasions, regardless of what Declan had said.

Adam reached out his hand and laid his palm flat against the beast’s great nose. The breath was warm and wet against his skin. “Why doesn’t he have a pen?”

“He was an...unexpected addition,” Ronan said. “All of the others I prepared for and went after to make Matthew happy. This one came to me.” He lifted his head and looked up at the sky.

Grey clouds were rolling in threatening to cut short their tour of madness. It was just as well, Adam did need to return to Harrisonburg eventually. Mostly to return the truck to the clinic. It wasn’t as if he had a raging social life that needed tending.

“Matthew’s the best part of me, you know?” Ronan said. “And ever since we were small I couldn’t help but hate it when he was sad. When he was seven he learned that dodo birds were extinct and he cried for a week. I couldn’t take it, you know? I was just a kid too, but I needed to find a way to fix it. And I did.”

“So you _found_ a dodo bird?”

“You could say that,” Ronan said.

Adam was sure he could say a lot of things. Anything he could come up with would make just as much sense. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something dark was being propagated in this beautiful place. He couldn’t believe what Ronan was saying, and something about that made him feel incomplete, like he’d failed a test. Adam hated failing tests, so he offered the next best thing to belief. He offered himself.

“I’ll take care of them.”

“I told you,” Ronan said. “I don’t need someone to take care of them. They don’t get sick.”

“Just in case,” Adam replied.

Ronan turned his steady gaze from the sky to Adam. He bit at his lower lip and seemed to be thinking very hard about something. “Okay,” he said. “Just in case.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) "A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh." Ezekiel 36:26 (KJV)
> 
> 2) Afternoon/early evening mass is totally a thing some places, right? Well it is now.


	3. In which there is fear.

 

August 20th, 2:53 PM

**ADAM PARRISH:** Hey, you have all day Friday off, right?

 **THE CHENGERIFFIC:** holy fuck adam parrish are you actually texting me on purpose right now

 

 **ADAM PARRISH:** Yes?

 

 

 **THE CHENGERIFFIC:** just checking that could have been a butt text. ass like that GOTTA have proper grammar

or to your sister or sumthin

 

 **ADAM PARRISH:** I don’t have a sister.

 **THE CHENGERIFFIC:** i don’t know how you’d think I know that you have told me literally nothing about yourself in the last three

years you could have been raised by wolves for all i know

 

 **ADAM PARRISH:** HENRY.

 

 

? **THE CHENGERIFFIC:** psssssh yeah man off friday like usual why you need it

 

 **ADAM PARRISH:** If I could.

 **THE CHENGERIFFIC:** sure we can swap

oh my god do you have a date

adam! ADAM PARRISH YOU HAVE TO TELL ME IF YOU HAVE A DATE

IT’S THE RULES OF SWAPSIES

 

 **ADAM PARRISH:** Thank you, Henry. It’s not a date.

 **THE CHENGERIFFIC:** that’s what some secretive bastard with a date would say

OH My god it’s with the DEMON farmer isn’t it

????????????????????

.adam. ADAM. PARRISH

 

~*~

When Adam was a child he used to daydream about having wild adventures. It was Harry Potter syndrome, he supposed, the belief that he was destined for some greater life than he had been living and that something magical would show up and whisk him away to it at any moment. He’d long ago grown out of that hope, but even at his most fanciful he would never have imagined this moment could be happening to anyone anywhere, let alone to him. Below him the unicorn balked at stepping into the river, dancing sideways and back a little bit. Adam clung to its main to hang on.

“Easy girl,” Ronan said, pulling up next to Adam at the river’s edge. He looked regal in his position atop the elk, like he was in command of the whole world.

“Can unicorns not cross moving water?” Blue asked, from her perch behind Ronan.

“Don’t be dumb,” Ronan replied. “It’s a unicorn, not a vampire.”

Adam had met Blue only half an hour earlier at the house, but he already liked her quite a bit. She was smart and pretty and quick and had called Ronan out on being a shit three times during their ride through the forest. The truly remarkable thing about that was even though Ronan groused back, he had not once tried to throw her off the elk or wriggle away from the tight grasp she had of his waist.

Blue hooked her chin over Ronan’s shoulder and grinned at him. “Or a vampire unicorn?”

Ronan frowned and let go of his grip on the elk’s antlers to try and bat her face away. Blue laughed and leaned as far back as she could while still grasping his shirt.

In the weeks following the confession about the animals’ existence, Ronan had been slipping out of his composed surliness and into something like calm more and more often around Adam. It was becoming such a common occurrence that Adam wasn’t at all shocked by it anymore. He found he quite liked being privy to it. It made him feel accepted, special.

Matthew rode up to Adam’s other side on the moa. He was wearing a backpack stuffed to near bursting, but the bird didn’t seem at all bothered by the weight of the bag or the boy. “We can just stop here,” he suggested. “There’s a clearing on the other side of the stream there.”

“Sounds good to me,” Blue said. She leaned back and stretched her arms up over her head, brushing tree branches with her fingertips. “Let me off this thing.”

Ronan held out his arm and let her use him as an anchor so she could slide off the beast and swing to the ground. Then he slipped off after her in what could only be described as a controlled fall. Adam was surprised when Ronan managed to hit the ground feet first. Blue came over and started running her fingers through the unicorn’s mane and whispering in its ear so it would stay still long enough for Adam to dismount. He hit the ground less steadily than either Blue or Ronan had, but he’d never ridden a horse before, so he was just grateful to have stuck the landing.

“Good girl,” Blue murmured, and continued to pet the unicorn’s face and neck.

“Stop fondling my animals,” Ronan said.

“Would you rather she fondle something else?” Adam asked.

Ronan glared at him with such intensity that Adam took a step backward. Blue started laughing. She laughed for several minutes straight. When her knees buckled she clung to the unicorn’s mane and pressed her face into its shoulder.

“What’s so funny?” Matthew asked.

“Ask vet boy,” Ronan snapped. He stomped off through the river without taking his boots off. The water looked like it was moving swiftly, but it only came up to his calves.

Matthew looked from Blue, who was still giggling into the unicorn, to Adam. Adam shrugged. Matthew shrugged back and followed after Ronan, hopping on stones that were sticking up out of the water to make his way across without getting his shoes wet.

Blue sat down on the ground next to the unicorn, winded from laughter, and started taking her shoes off. “I owe you for that one.”

“For what?”

Blue used her sock stuffed shoe to gesture across the river. There was a break in the tree canopy about twenty yards from the water’s edge, which put the brothers in the middle of a small golden circle of sunlight. Matthew and Ronan were laying out a blanket in the clearing. Ronan snapped his ends of the blanket angrily, as if he was trying to draw and quarter it.

“I’m afraid he’s become immune to my asshole comments over the last several years. I’m glad to see he’s still collecting people who will keep him on his toes.”

“It was an honest question,” Adam said. “You two looked pretty cozy up there.”

“God it’s been a long time since some asshole mistook us for something we weren’t,” Blue said. “You obviously think I’m more naive than I am, but honest or not, you did know it would piss him off when you said that.”

Adam toed out of his own shoes and socks and bent over to roll up his jeans. “Maybe,” he admitted.

“Uh huh. Come on.”

She waded out into the river, but didn’t make her way immediately across as Ronan and Matthew had. Instead she moved slowly in a zig zagging direction with her eyes trained down into the water. Adam followed.

The water was cooler than he expected it to be. He reasoned that it was probably coming down from one of the mountains, though they were a ways into the valley and it was likely warm at the peaks as well this time of year. It was very clear water either way. He could see every fish that darted around his ankles and every moss covered rock nestled in the mud. Blue was obviously looking for something, so Adam kept his head down and his eyes peeled too.

There were a couple gold colored glints revealed by the sun sweeping across the water as the tree branches shifted in the wind, but none of them turned out to be more than small pieces of rock with bits of pyrite in them. Adam tossed each one as he dismissed it and they made satisfying _plop_ sounds in the water.

“Aha!” Blue shouted suddenly. She reached into the water and came up with an egg shaped rock about the size of her fist.

Adam waded over to her so he could get a closer look at it. It was mostly smooth, but the end of it had been knocked off and was displaying a stunning array of white, blue, and green stones on the inside. Blue held it out to him and he accepted it, holding it up in the light. The dancing shadows made the colors look like the ocean roiling with a storm. A tempest in a small rock instead of a teapot.

“It’s a geode,” she said.

“I know.” Adam held it out to give it back.

Blue shook her head and pushed his hand gently toward his chest. “You keep it. I have many years of his wonders socked away. We can’t move in our house without tripping over some great or godawful thing Gansey refuses to get rid of simply because Ronan gave it to him. I swear, if you ask Gansey he’d tell you Ronan created the whole world.”

“Oh,” Adam said. He had known that Gansey loved Ronan’s farm, his enthusiasm for everything in it could not be contained. He had known also, he guessed, that Gansey loved Ronan. The two of them fought as much as they laughed, but there seemed to be nothing about Ronan’s terribleness that could put Gansey off, even when Ronan tried, and sometimes Ronan could be very trying. Adam had a lot of questions, but he figured it was probably impolite to ask them. Instead he said, “I didn’t know you lived with Gansey.”

“I didn’t say, but yeah. We’re basically married.” The softly dappled light falling across Blue’s face highlighted her eyes and made her look even prettier than Adam had already thought she was. He felt the familiar pang in his gut that came from wanting something he couldn’t have. “Ronan used to really resent me, in the beginning. He used to think I was taking over his place in Gansey’s life. I think now I understand a little about how he was feeling then.”

“Why?”

Blue tilted her head and the ends of her dark choppy hair brushed her shoulder. “Because you’re taking him from us, just a bit. He doesn’t go anywhere, but sometimes it’s like he’s gone somewhere. You know?”

Adam didn’t know. He turned his head to see Matthew and Ronan sitting on the blanket. Matthew had kicked off his shoes and was collecting small white flowers from the grass around them. Ronan was furiously shoving handfuls of chips into his mouth and watching Adam and Blue with a curiously blank expression. Adam caught Ronan’s eye, but Ronan looked away quick.

“Ronan’s a dick and I refuse to get more involved in his nonsense than I already am,” Blue said. “But I know that look on your face. I didn’t grow up with much, and I’m familiar with the guilt that comes with a windfall. Just know that, regardless of whatever else happens, you shouldn’t be afraid to have beautiful things.”

“So like, do we wax on and wax off now?” Adam asked.

“Ugh, assholes, all of you,” Blue said.

She leaned down, scooped up a handful of water, and tossed it at Adam’s face. Adam tripped backwards as he tried to get away from it and his foot landed on a slick rock. He managed to catch himself before he fell into the water, but the legs of his jeans were damp from all the sloshing around.

“You jerks deserve each other.” She waded out of the river and skipped over the grass to the blanket.

Adam inspected the geode as his ankles and feet went numb in the water. He knew what he deserved. He’d worked hard for his place in the world. He’d studied so he could have the job he did and now he did as well as he possibly could at that job to make sure he could keep it and be promoted on to bigger and better things. He deserved what all of his sweat and stress had bought him. This was extra. This was what his mother would call a blessing and what his father would call a distraction. This was not his to keep because it wasn’t something he’d built.

He knew that he could work for a million years and never build something half as beautiful as what Ronan had been given. Adam was sometimes accused of being magic, because he could usually help animals no one else could, but that was patience, not magic. Magic was something else. Ronan, with his mysterious creatures and beautiful lands, was also something else. Maybe, if he tilted his head and squinted, Adam could see how being good at his job had brought him to this place too. It was hard for this magic to feel earned for someone who didn’t believe in magic.

Adam shoved the geode into the pocket of his jeans and made his way over to the blanket. Blue had curled up on her side next to Matthew, so Adam sat down next to Ronan. Ronan was leaning back on his hands with his legs stretched out in front of him, sprawled out and taking up most of the blanket. Adam didn’t have a choice but to sit close him.

“See if I invite you back,” Ronan said, in response to some comment Adam had obviously missed.

Ronan leaned over Adam and grabbed some grapes from a bag in the middle of the blanket. He threw the whole handful of them at Blue. One of them bounced off Blue’s shoulder. She picked it up from the blanket and popped it into her mouth.

“You don’t have to,” Blue said. “I’m the eternal plus one on Gansey’s open invitation.”

Ronan tossed another volley of grapes in her direction. “I knew a girl would be his downfall.”

“Where’d you hear that?” Blue asked, batting her eyelashes. “Psychic?”

“I heard it from common fucking sense.” Ronan said.

“We can’t give the land to anyone else,” Matthew interjected. “It was in dad’s will.”

“That seems like a weird stipulation,” Adam said. He reached over and plucked a grape from where it was caught in the crease near Blue’s bent elbow. She stuck her tongue out at him. “Even if it was held in trust when he first died, you’re all over eighteen now. You should be able to do what you like with it.”

“I am doing what I like with it,” Ronan said, his voice slightly higher as he mimicked Adam’s thicker valley accent. “I like being here and Matthew likes being here and Declan can barely stand to look at the place, which makes me like being here even more.”

“You don’t have to be a dick,” Adam said.

“Uh, have you met him?” Blue asked. “He does. He’s made of piss and vinegar and if you try to replace either with something nice he’ll die.”

She stretched, sat up, and leaned her head onto Matthew’s shoulder. Without taking his eyes away from the string of wildflowers he was tying together, Matthew tilted his face down so their foreheads would touch.

“No, vet boy is right.” Ronan leaned in close to him again, placing a hand on Adam’s knee to use as balance while he retrieved a bottle of water from another bag. He left his hand there while he opened the plastic twist cap with his teeth. Ronan spit the bottle cap in Blue’s direction. “I don’t have to be anything, but I do _like_ to be a dick. Especially when it comes to Declan.”

Ronan pulled his hand away from Adam’s knee to block the cap being tossed back in his direction. Adam tried to ignore the goosebumps he could see raising on his forearms. He got a bottle of water of his own and stared at Ronan while opening it and loudly thinking, _do you see how much easier this is with your hands?_ Ronan smirked in response.

Adam sighed. He put his lips to the water bottle and murmured, “Sometimes families suck.”

“That was cold,” Ronan said, approving. He stretched out onto his back with his arms crossed behind his head. “What happened to that bleeding heart that begged me to let him work on animals for free?”

“I did not beg,” Adam said, indignant. Ronan’s elbow rested on top of his thigh and Adam thought that Ronan might as well be lying in his lap. Then he felt himself start to flush and looked to Blue for support. “Looking out for animals is what I do for a living. You can’t just show me a whole bunch of animals and not let me make sure they’re taken care of.”

Blue nodded, but did nothing to intervene.

“Fuck that noble shit,” Ronan said. “You just like the challenge of them. I already told you, they take care of themselves.”

“If they’re a challenge it’s because they _shouldn’t exist_. Not everything is capable of just taking care of itself and there’s not a person in the world who can care for a dodo bird, because there’s not a living person who’s ever seen one!”

“Except for us,” Matthew said.

Blue leaned forward, propping an elbow on Matthew’s shoulder in place of her head. “Wait,” she said. “He doesn’t know?”

“He knows that I _found them_ ,” Ronan said through gritted teeth.

Blue’s mouth fell open in a small _o_ and her eyebrows disappeared behind her bangs. Matthew draped a finished flower crown on top of her head.

“You stay out of it,” Ronan spat. He looked up at Adam, squinting into the sunlight. “And you, does it ever get lonely up there?”

“Up where?” Adam asked, knowing full well he would probably regret it.

He wished he was capable of ignoring Ronan’s taunts, but that had been an impossibility from the start. Ronan was as magnetic as he was terrible, and the more Adam learned about him and his home the more he wanted to know. It had been a naive wish he’d had that first day when he wanted to call a place like this his own.

Now that want was turning into something else entirely and it was burrowing itself deep into his gut. If he wasn’t careful it was going to get stuck there. The last thing Adam needed was another desire that couldn’t be met, and yet, it was all he seemed to collect anymore.

Ronan closed his eyes and rolled onto his back as if he was dismissing the conversation. Blue reached out quickly to rescue the food from being crushed as he resituated himself. The newly empty space gave Ronan easy access to Matthew’s bare feet. Ronan reached out and pinched Matthew’s big toes and shook them.

Matthew dropped the flowers he was working on and beat at Ronan’s hands, laughing. “Stop it!” he cried. “You know that tickles!”

He scooted back off the blanket and Ronan wildly reached to chase after him without looking. It was incredible to Adam, the ease with which Ronan inhabited his own form. He was a physical man, constantly horsing around with Matthew or Destroyer, letting Chainsaw use him as a perch, gently bumping hands with Adam whenever they walked side by side around the farm. Ronan was comfortable touching people and being touched in a way that Adam had never experienced. Adam longed for that sort of ease of self.

Ronan cracked an eye open and caught Adam looking at him. “Oh,” Ronan said, as if he’d just remembered what he was going to say before. “On that high horse.”

“Ronan,” Blue said. “Stop being an asshole to the guy who makes sure your cows don’t die.”

Ronan sat up and left several inches between Adam and himself. Adam was caught somewhere between relieved that there was no one in his space and offended that Ronan no longer wanted to be in hise space.

“Cows take care ‘emselves too,” Ronan said. “Just that if they aren’t registered with some vet somewhere it’s like they don’t exist. And if they don’t exist I can’t sell what they make. Take that shit up with the CIA.”

“I think you mean FDA,” Adam said.

He thought that maybe if he started small he could get used to being close to people. It was like wading into the cold river. Eventually he’d become numb to the anxiety it caused in him, probably. He reached for the potato chips, because they were on the other side of Ronan.

“Do you now, Einstein?” Ronan reached out slowly and gently picked a ladybug off Adam’s forearm.

Adam watched as Ronan tilted his hand this way and that to make the ladybug run back and forth across his fingers. “Did you know,” he asked, “that you were an impossible human being?”

“You seem to like impossible things,” Ronan said. “Or you wouldn’t be angling to test a unicorn’s piss.” He blew on the ladybug and it flew away.

Adam tried to burn that moment into his memory. Ronan Lynch sat in a clearing in an over green summer forest, wearing all black, aggressive tattoo hooking out of his tank top, his long dark eyelashes fanned out over his cheeks, and his lips pursed into the blow. Ronan was such a mess of contradictions that it was hard to believe he could exist as one person. Ronan’s hidden inner depth was probably just as elusive as the poor dodo bird itself if you didn’t know to look for it, and Ronan kept both things carefully tucked away. Adam deserved what he worked for, not what he was gifted, but he felt like this moment couldn’t exist without both give and take.

Blue caught Adam’s eye and raised an eyebrow. _Is this what you wanted?_ she seemed to ask. Adam shook his head, because truthfully, he didn’t know.

 

~*~

There was a phone ringing.

Adam thought it was part of the nightmare he was having. In it the old wall mounted phone in his father’s trailer rang and rang. Adam was pressed up against the counter, the rigid corner of it sticking painfully into his back, as his father screamed at him to answer the phone. The people in Adam’s dreams were often hazy around the edges, but his father’s red face, spittle flying from his thin angry lips, was as sharp as day because it was a memory and not something his mind had thrown together. Answering the phone was an impossible task with his father between him and it and of course his father wouldn’t move to let Adam through. The gnarled tangle of coiled cord taunted him from across the room. The phone rang and rang, and his father screamed and screamed.

The ringing stopped. In his dream the phone crumbled and fell off the wall, the small remains of it hitting the floor with a sound like rain against a metal roof. With the quiet came relief and Adam felt suddenly free.

He opened his eyes and sat upright, relieved to find himself in his own bed in his own apartment. He took deep gulps of breath and stared up at the lights that came in through his blinds and splayed across his ceiling in gradually widening stripes. He was covered with sweat and felt smothered by the sheets clinging to him tight. He kicked them off and reached for his phone on the nightstand.

It started ringing again as soon as he touched it and he jerked his hand away in surprise. When he scrambled to pick it up again he knocked over a plastic cup of water and had to quickly rescue the phone from being soaked. The water dripped over the edge of nightstand and onto the carpet in a thick sounding dampened stream. Adam cursed at himself and swaddled the phone in his blankets to dry it before holding it up to his face. The display read _LYNCH FARM_. Adam groaned and hit Accept.

“What time is it?” he asked. His throat was dry and his voice was sleep rough. He would drink some water to help, but well.

“I don’t fucking know,” Ronan said on the other end. Thunder sounded in the background. “I can’t look at the time on the phone while I’m on it. I need you. Get out here.”

“You...need me?” Adam asked. He puzzled through the notion, the last bit of drowsiness clinging to his brain made it difficult to parse. Out of all the people on the planet, how was he the one Ronan needed?

“Yes,” Ronan growled. “It’s Dawn.”

Adam peered out the window, searching for light on the horizon through the slits in his blinds. The only light was the orange halos on the street lamps. “It’s not.”

“The moa!” Ronan shouted. “There’s something wrong with her!”

“Oh!” That catapulted Adam to wakefulness. He threw his legs over the edge of the bed and put his foot down into the wet patch on his carpet. “Fucking, shit!” he gasped, and hopped over to his closet where he dried his foot off on a dirty t-shirt.

“Exactly,” Ronan said. “How long will it take you get here?”

“An hour, I think.” Adam struggled to pull on the first pair of jeans he found on the floor. “I’ve never come from my home before.”

“An hour,” Ronan repeated. “I’ll stay with her until then.” He hung up and the line went silent.

Adam pulled the phone away from his ear to check the time. 2:30 in the morning, of course. A hot spike of anger at Ronan’s hubris and his demanding nature zipped down Adam’s spine. He texted Noah to let him know that there was a late night animal emergency and that he might not be in in the morning. Then he finished getting dressed, tossed a dirty towel at the puddle of water by his bed, and dashed out to his car. The wind had picked up and the trees around him thrashed about. Above him the thick clouds of the early autumn storm reflected back the light from the city.

For the entirety of the drive to the Barns Adam ran through a list of common ostrich and emu diseases in his head. He couldn’t remember many from his studies and he wasn’t even sure if the moa would be susceptible to the same problems. Ideally in a situation like this he’d be given time to to do his research. Ideally he wouldn’t even be _in_ a situation like this. How was one person supposed to save an animal from the problems of its own extinction? It hit him suddenly just how lonely the animals might be as the only ones of their kind and a new frustration with Ronan flared hot within him.

By the time he pulled onto Ronan’s driveway it was a downpour and there was no visibility, even when he turned on his car’s weak brights. He had to make his way very slowly so he didn’t run into a tree or spin out in the gravel. Once he came to a stop beside the plum tree he hopped out of the car and ran around the main house in the cold rain, slipping in the mud the whole way with his bag banging against his knees.

The moa’s stable was the only one with golden light flickering and slipping out between the slats. Adam marched toward it, feet sloshing in the puddles, his socks and shoes drenched and coated with dirt. Adam flung the door to the stable open and jumped inside.

The stuffy warmth engulfed him as soon as the door banged closed and shut out the rain. There was a single oil lamp lighting the inside of the stable, which made the scene before him feel intimate and small. The large bird was laid out across the length of the space with her head propped in Ronan’s lap. Ronan was just as soaked as Adam was, his wet t-shirt stretched across his back and shoulders and his sweat pants clinging to his thighs. He was barefoot and shivering, but he didn’t move to warm himself. He merely stroked the bird’s beak and whispered to it in a low, ragged voice.

Adam had been privy to many glimpses of gentleness in Ronan over the last several months, but this was something else. There was another edge to this emotion that Adam wasn’t used to seeing in Ronan. It was fear, he realized. Ronan Lynch was afraid.

Well good, Adam decided. It served him right for meddling with things that no one had a right to be meddling with. Adam wiped the water from his face with his hand and pushed his hair back off his forehead. He exhaled loudly.

Ronan’s head shot up. “It’s about damn time,” he snarled. “Get over here and figure out what’s wrong with her.”

“I can tell you what’s wrong with her from here,” Adam said. He slowly approached both the creature and Ronan, wary of the hurt that wounded animals were capable of inflicting. “She’s not supposed to exist.”

“Well, she does,” Ronan snapped. “What else is there?”

Adam knelt next to Ronan and handed him a small flashlight he kept in his kit. “Point this at her.”

He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and started parting the feathers along her face and neck in even intervals. He worked slowly and methodically in purposeful counterpoint to the chaos that coiled in every bit of Ronan’s scared being. Adam had always responded to stress and fear with order and rules and the thoughtful repetition of actions he could control. It usually made him feel less helpless, but it wasn’t working now. He studied the skin beneath the bird’s stubby plumage, but it wasn’t blue or greying like he’d feared it might be.

The bird convulsed under their hands. Ronan dropped the flashlight and resumed stroking her head and whispering to her. The flashlight rolled beneath Ronan’s knee, which obstructed the beam so that it bounced up from the hay covered floor in separated wings of light that shone around his face. It left a stark collar around the soft, hollow lighting the lamp lent to him.

“What does she eat?” Adam asked.

“I don’t know,” Ronan said. He let out a long string of colorful swear words. “Fruit? Small animals? Rocks sometimes. Was it the rocks? I told the dumb bird not to eat the rocks.”

“She’s supposed to eat the rocks. They do that,” Adam replied. “It helps large birds with digestion. What else?”

“I don’t know!”

“Of course you don’t!” Adam snapped, angry that Ronan would just own something this magnificent without bothering to have the proper knowledge. “You don’t know anything about her! You don’t think things through. You think that just because you can do something with money it means you _should_ do something with money! You went to whatever crazy lengths you could to recreate creatures from dead, dying, and impossible species and you never stopped to consider the consequences.”

There was a long pause. When Ronan finally spoke his voice was quiet. He stared steadily down at the bird and refused to meet Adam’s eyes. “I considered the consequences.”

“You considered the consequences for you and Matthew, not for the bird. God damnit!” Adam tried to feel around the bird’s body as another tremor of convulsions ran through it. ”There’s a reason these animals are extinct!”

“Yeah, because people killed all of them! Because that’s what people do when they find something great that they don’t understand. Just, what I should do now!?” Ronan shouted, voice breaking. “Please, tell me what to do.”

“Get out,” Adam said.

Ronan didn’t reply. When he finally looked up Adam saw that Ronan’s eyes were bright with imminent tears and his jaw was twitching furiously. He was no doubt struggling to keep his temper in check, trying to weigh getting rid of Adam against the fact that Adam was probably the only person who could help him. Ronan’s fear and uncertainty, predictably, presented as more anger.

“Excuse me?” he asked, voice low and sharp.

“You heard me,” Adam said. “You’ve done enough. Get out. I’ll come to the house and get you if I need you.” He picked up the flashlight and used it to point at the door.

Ronan very gently slid the bird’s great head from his lap. Her beak worked as she moved to reach for him again, but he placed a hand over her eyes and pulled himself up off the ground. He took his hand away and shoved it into his pocket as he stood up straight.

“Fuck you.” Ronan’s voice was a harsh whisper that barely cut through the gloom and the sound of the storm. “You wanted to take care of them, fucking take care of them then. Prove you’re worthy of them.” Then he stormed out and let the wooden door slam behind him.

The peace that fell in his wake was only relative.The rain still pounded heavily on the wooden roof and walls and there were several places where water dribbled down between the slats in rapid, plinking streams. The humidity and the smell of warm bird was oppressive as Adam leaned over the creature and tried to listen to her breathing. The breaths came out in rasps, but he couldn’t hear a rattle of fluid in her lungs, even with the stethoscope, so he was hopeful it wasn’t bird tuberculosis.

He checked her over again and again, ticking possible ailments off his mental list, all the while stroking her neck gently and whispering to her the way Ronan had been when he arrived. Once he’d run through the list of things he vaguely remembered might happen to ostriches or emus he pulled out his phone and started to search.

The rain subsided and the dripping stopped. The battery on Adam’s phone died about 5 AM and the bird passed out soon after. She stopped convulsing and started shivering in small tremors.

Adam was exhausted and at the point of frustrated tears. How stupid of him to think that a creature from the past could be cured by modern knowledge. There had to be something missing, some important fact about her provenance that he didn’t know and it was going to be the reason he failed her. Adam hated not knowing things and he hated it even more when things were kept from him.

How stupid of Ronan to do this to her. How stupid of Ronan to trust him. He wished, fervently and in vain, that he was in possession of the magic that other people had accused him of having. He wished he believed in magic or God or anything like a holy spirit. He wished for anything that might let him lay his hands on this bird and talk to it plainly and coax it away from the cold darkness hovering just out of view.

Adam leaned over her, laid his head against her breast, and stretched his arms around her great body, trying to cover her and keep her warm. “Please,” he whispered. “Please get better. You’ll upset Matthew if you die.”

Her lungs sounded better than they had a couple hours earlier and her shivering was coming less frequently. He felt wary of this rebound and utterly useless, because he knew he hadn’t had a hand in it. Adam couldn’t claim to have cured an animal he didn’t know how to treat. He listened to her breathing for a while, then he closed his eyes and counted her breaths until his exhaustion overtook him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) I'm sorry this is so late! I'll try to make sure the last two chapters don't take this long.
> 
> 2) You know Henry stole Adam's phone once he realized they would be working together and put his own name and number in there. 
> 
> 3) I read a lot of pages about ostrich and emu diseases while writing this, but none of them were half as fun as all the images I found of people actually riding ostriches. Just google that. You won't be disappointed.


	4. In which there is beauty.

Adam could feel his shoulder being nudged, but he didn’t care. Sitting up felt like an impossible prospect. Every part of him was heavy and tired. Once, in high school, Adam had been awake for four days straight because of work and finals. This was like that. With his cheek still pressed to the bird’s great chest, Adam could feel its steady breathing. Ultimately, like those tests all those years before, this test had also been passed. There wasn’t anything for him to do now but remain curled up here in sleepy victory.

The shoulder nudge came again. “I’m going to sick Destroyer on you if you don’t get up, asshole.”

Instead of dignifying Ronan with a response, Adam turned his head so that the sun spilling in through the stable’s open door wasn’t hitting him directly in the face.

Ronan sighed. It sounded as much like an angry curse as a stream of air ever could. The next thing Adam felt was wet as Destroyer licked at his face.

“Ugh, fine.” Adam shoved at the wolf’s great barrel of a chest and pushed her away. Destroyer took this to mean that they were playing and jumped on top of Adam with one huge paw pressing into his stomach that knocked all of the air out of Adam’s lungs. He rolled out of Destroyer’s tackle and sat up. “I’m awake. I’m up. Jesus, call off your demon dog.”

Ronan let out a low, trilling whistle Adam had never heard before and Destroyer returned to his side. The wolf stayed close, but continued to jump about happily and pace around Ronan, ready for the next game. “I warned you, shithead,” Ronan said.

Adam rubbed his eyes and scrubbed his wolf spit covered face with his shirt. “Is that really how you’re going to speak to the me right now?”

What Adam meant by that was  _is that really how you’re going to speak to the man who left his warm bed to run through a torrential downpour and spend all night with your dumb impossible bird_ and also _I’m a professional and a human being and deserve some respect, even from you, Ronan Lynch, who is allergic to respect_. He felt like saying all of that out loud would belabor the point. Also, he hadn’t yet had any coffee and the thought of stringing that many words together made his head hurt. He wondered if that was how Ronan always felt about speaking.

“Yup,” was all Ronan said in reply. He leaned over and held out his hand. Adam took it and let Ronan pull him to his feet. Once Adam let go of Ronan’s hand, Ronan crossed his arms tight over his chest, as if in containing himself he could be protected from further contact. They stood over the bird and watched it breathe. “She looks fine.”

“I think she’s through the worst of it,” Adam said. “But I don’t claim to know what it was or if it will happen again.”

An expectant silence settled between them. The sun coming in through the door was muted and golden. Every dust mote or piece of feather and hay that Destroyer disturbed in her pacing showed in the air between them, roiling like a river. It was almost a physical barrier. Ronan uncrossed his arms and crossed them again. He dropped his hands to his sides and balled them into fists. He looked down at Destroyer and scratched her behind the ears. Then he looked Adam square in the eye and reached a hand out toward him.

Adam stiffened, afraid not of what Ronan would do, but of how he might react to being touched. It wasn't always something he could control, especially not when he was as tired as he was now, and Adam had to be constantly mindful about other people in his space and how unhinged he could come across as if someone carelessly provoked him into a panic. Ronan pulled several short, stubby feathers from Adam’s hair and held them up between them. The sunlight made the pale skin of his arm glow from the elbow up and Adam wished he could see himself in this light. He wanted to glow too.

Ronan dropped the feathers. They fluttered gracefully to the ground. “Come on,” he said.

Destroyer followed after Ronan as he left the stable, her tail wagging wildly. Adam followed Destroyer and tried to stay out of whacking range. Ronan waited for Adam before closing the gate to the pen and then paused, looking up at the house.

Adam took the moment to swallow his pride. It burned, just like it always did. “I’m sorry I yelled at you last night.”

“I’m not,” Ronan said. He started up the yard, evading whatever confession might come next. “Noah called me. He said to let you know you’re off the hook for today and he’ll see you tomorrow after you’ve gotten some sleep. Said to tell you he was glad he was right about you.”

“Why?” Adam asked.

“Fuck if I know,” Ronan said. “Probably because he’s a smug asshole who likes to be right about things.”

“Takes one to know one,” Adam grumbled.

He saw Ronan’s fleeting grin out of the corner of his eye. Noah had told Adam that he’d sent him out to the Barns because he thought Adam might understand Ronan, because of all the ways they were alike, but there had to be something else to it. The ways they were different were just as numerous. The ways this could have blown up in all of their faces had been too many to number.

Ronan wasn’t angry that Adam had yelled at him. Ronan hadn’t retaliated for Adam yelling at him that first day, either. Some small part of Adam was still waiting for that shoe to drop and he knew in that moment that it was never going to, because Ronan Lynch liked being challenged. He was an awful piss of a human about it, to be sure, but it wasn’t because he didn’t like to be questioned. Every friend of Ronan’s that Adam had met challenged Ronan regularly. Difficult moments passed between Ronan and his friends like water, and even when feelings were hurt there was seemingly always a new tide on the horizon that would wash it all away. Noah had known that. Noah also knew Adam.

“Oh,” Adam said, coming to this realization six months too late.

Ronan turned his head, but he didn’t make a comment. He waited for Adam to speak. He was always, it seemed, waiting for Adam to get places on his own. As difficult as Ronan was, Adam could admit that loved this about him. He loved that even when he felt entirely out of his depth, Ronan trusted him to do the right thing. He had come to love quite a few things about Ronan over their time working together. He was frustrated suddenly. He was frustrated with himself and Ronan and Noah, and life for never giving him a straight path that was easy to follow.

“I asked Noah once,” he said, in answer to Ronan’s unasked question. “Why I wasn’t brought on training runs here if I was going to have to work with you. Why wasn’t I introduced? But no one is, are they? Because Noah knows about the other animals and doesn’t want to draw attention to you.”

Ronan shrugged as he stepped up onto the first step of the back porch. “Noah knows a lot, and he has an uncanny ability to know things he shouldn’t. Wait here.”

Ronan and Destroyer went into the house. Adam placed his bag by the door and sat down on one of the white rocking chairs to wait as Ronan had asked. Chainsaw flew onto the porch and landed on the back of the other rocking chair, sending it swaying. She stared at him with her bright black eyes.

Adam was too tired to have a staring contest with an uncanny bird, so he studied the parts of the farm he could see from where he was sitting. He let himself settle into the feel of it. There was an early morning mist hanging low to the ground all around the farmhouse. It dispersed the sunlight and cast everything in a burnished haze. The mountains hulked up in the distance, watching over the valley and this miraculous place. The thick green grass was wet with dew and everything was coated with the hush of possibility.

It was a lot like that day months ago when Adam had first pulled up to the property, not knowing what to expect. Who were these people who lived with wolves and ravens and extinct creatures? How had their lives brought them to a moment when such marvels were commonplace? How had his? And who was he to even think he deserved to know? Somewhere out in the yard the unicorn whinnied and the sound rang out through the quiet, claiming the moment for its own.

Ronan came back out onto the porch with two mugs of coffee and let the screen door bang shut behind him. Another quiet moment dispelled and claimed. Adam was going to have to fight with everything on this damn farm to claim moments and noises and movements of his own. The thought thrilled him, as if he’d been asleep and was just now waking up to what being alive could mean. Ronan looked at him strangely, shook his head, and held out one of the mugs.

“What?” Adam asked, accepting the coffee.

“That was my mother’s favorite chair,” Ronan said.

He turned his back on Adam and walked to the edge of the porch. Adam noticed that he’d taken off his shoes and socks so that he was barefoot beneath his jeans. Adam was so used to seeing him in black boots with thick, clomping soles that this felt like a vulnerability being granted.

Adam jumped out of the chair. He sloshed some of the coffee onto his fingers. It burned and he hissed and tried to lick it off. “Sorry,” he said reflexively, and joined Ronan at the porch rail.

“Nothing to be sorry for,” Ronan said. “She’d be sad to know no one uses it. A well used thing knows it’s loved, is what she would say about that.”

There was a certain specific familial sadness in Ronan that Adam did not think he could fathom.

“Matthew sits in it sometimes,” Ronan continued. “When he doesn’t think anyone else is awake.”

“I’m—” Adam started.

Ronan shook his head and took another sip of his coffee.

Adam wanted to say ‘I’m sorry’ again. I’m sorry you lost them even though you loved them, but it was such a poor stand in for true understanding. I’m sorry was also clearly not a set of words that Ronan valued, so they would be useless no matter how many times Adam said them. He felt inadequate and small in the face of everything Ronan had, the beauty and the hurt. Adam knew hurt intimately, but he’d always felt like beauty belonged to other people.

He didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. Adam sipped at his coffee, trying to make it last, relishing in its warmth. He breathed in and out, and he listened to Ronan breathing in and out, and he waited for whatever was going to come.

Nothing came. Ronan upended his mug to finish the coffee and took it back inside.

When he returned he closed the screen door quietly, giving the moment away, perhaps. It was a few minutes before he was back at the porch rail. This time he stood closer to Adam than he had before. He didn’t touch Adam. He didn’t even talk to him. He just stood there and waited for Adam to finish. Adam gulped down the rest of his coffee and passed the cup back.

“Thank you,” he said.

Ronan took the mug and bent down to set it on the ground behind him. Destroyer nosed her way through the screen door and came trundling out of the house to wind about their legs and shove her nose into the cup. Ronan half-heartedly kicked at her with his bare feet, but Destroyer didn’t pay any attention to him.

“Dumb wolf,” he said. Ronan turned toward Adam then and leaned in, with his elbow against the porch rail and his back against the post. “I should uh,” he started. He stopped, took a deep breath, started again. “I should thank you.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Adam said.

“You came,” Ronan replied. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Of course I did. Ronan, I’m your vet. One of your animals was in danger. I’m honestly not sure anything I did made a difference, but if I hadn’t tried and she’d gotten worse. I’d...that’s not why I got into this, to just stand aside while helpless creatures hurt.”

“No, I mean, literally. You didn’t have to. I didn’t call you because I thought you could help her. I knew you couldn’t help her.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Adam said.

“No, listen.” Ronan looked down at his hands. “I called you because I was afraid and I didn’t want to be afraid alone.”

“Okay.” Adam understood fear more than he understood most things, and he knew what it was like to not want to be alone.

“It’s not okay. There’s nothing you can do for Dawn. I keep telling you that. There’s nothing you can do for any of them. They don’t exist like you, they’re not real.”

“What do you mean they’re not real?” Adam had touched all of them. He’d seen them eat and play. They were at least as real as he was. “Even if they were a mass hallucination, you guys love them, so they’re real enough.”

Ronan let out a colorless laugh. “I do love them. Or I love them because Matthew loves them. Unfortunately, I tend to hurt the things I love.”

“First of all,” Adam replied. “That’s bullshit. I’ve met your friends, remember. Second of all—”

“Stop, God.” Ronan looked Adam dead in the eyes, his own blue eyes clear beneath his dark lashes. It was the look he leveled on Adam all the time. The dare of a look that demanded to be met. Adam met it. Ronan pushed away from the rail and paced the porch in a small figure eight that mirrored the way Destroyer paced when she was agitated or excited. “I’m trying to tell you something. I’m trying to make you understand. Just, shut up. I, I made them.”

“Yes, so you keep saying. You and your secret mad scientist lab.”

Ronan spun on his heel and tapped his chest with both hands. “No, _I_ made them. I pulled them from nothing. Matthew wanted them so I wanted them. I thought about them. I found them in my dreams. I woke up with them. _I made them_. It’s a thing I can do, that my dad could do, and you can’t tell anyone about it.”

“Ronan,” Adam said. “You’re not making any sense. You haven’t slept, have you? Let’s get you inside and then we can—”

“It's real,” Ronan insisted. “I can show you.”

“Don’t show me.” Adam held up his hands. He needed to get away from Ronan’s heavy gaze and the presence of the wolf and bird that maybe, just maybe, existed because of magic. Magic that wasn’t real, that didn’t exist, because magic _couldn’t_ exist. “Where’s your bathroom?”

“Through the kitchen, upstairs, second door on the left.”

“Thank you,” Adam said.

Ronan narrowed his eyes as he watched Adam go. Chainsaw squawked at Adam from her perch, probably admonishing his disbelief. Adam couldn’t be mad at her for that. He’d had pieces of himsef questioned many times by people who were well meaning or just indifferent. Someone not believing in you, while frustrating, was not enough to actually make you disappear. He knew that.

Adam wound his way through the house and thought about the people who believed in him, really and truly. He could count them on both hands. For some people that might be a disaster, but for him it was progress. For most of his life he’d barely needed one hand to do it. Now when he did it Ronan Lynch was right there on the middle finger of his second hand.

He found the bathroom and thought about how unfair he’d been to Ronan last night. How he’d known that Ronan had been afraid and had cast him out anyway, sent him away to be alone when he’d been summoned specifically so that Ronan wouldn’t be alone. That wasn’t his fault. He hadn’t known that. It’s not like Ronan had said ‘you can’t save her, but I just want you to sit here next to me.’ Except he had. He’d said it the only way he knew how.

Adam washed his hands and stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. He looked terrible. The skin under his eyes was dark and his hair was a mess. He’d been wearing gloves for most of the night but he still had something dark under his nails that he really had to scrape at.

 _You don’t owe him your belief. You don’t owe him anything_ , he thought. Then he thought, _love isn’t about what’s owed_. There had been a time in his life when he hadn’t believed in love, either. It was something he’d needed to be shown over and over. It was something he still tried to logic away and it was a good day when he failed to do so. If love could exist in the world without him seeing it for so long, why not magic?

The most important thing, the thing Adam mulled over as he made his way back down the stairs, was that Ronan had never lied to him. As far as Adam could tell Ronan had never lied to anyone that he kept in his small group. He hadn’t explained the magic from the start, but he’d never given any other explanation for the creatures’ existence either. It was obvious from his behavior this morning that the magic was a gift, but also a heavy thing that was hard for him to carry and even harder for him to articulate. He hadn’t needed to tell Adam this, but he’d trusted Adam with it anyway.

Adam thought of how he’d been worried about the animals’ loneliness if they were the only ones of their kinds. Ronan too, as far as Adam could tell, was the only one of his kind. What of his loneliness? How heavy was his heart?

Ronan said he made the animals to make Matthew happy. Adam suspected that, given the chance, Ronan might remake the whole world to make Matthew happy. That was a love that Adam couldn’t fathom any more than he could fathom Ronan’s sadness. Ronan was a brat, but he was also a god, and in every story Adam had ever read those two things went hand in hand.

Ronan was a god. Adam was important to him. It was such an impossible, heady feeling.

Adam stepped back out onto the porch. Ronan was sitting on the top step. Destroyer was sitting next to him with her head in his lap. Chainsaw was perched on his shoulder. Both animals turned to look at Adam when they heard him, but Ronan sat still as a statue and kept his eyes trained forward.

The lines of his tattoo arced gracefully out of his shirt collar. Adam wondered how fearsome and beautiful the rest of it was. He wondered if it was as fearsome and beautiful as Ronan himself. He wondered if he’d ever really know.

“Okay,” he said.

When Ronan turned to look back at Adam he was frowning. He clearly didn’t want to look at Adam, but knew that if he spoke to the backyard and not directly at him, that Adam wouldn’t hear him. Adam usually didn’t have any trouble hearing Ronan, who made his declarations as if he was giving orders to the whole of the world, but this was a different version of Ronan than Adam had ever seen. Still, even in his anger, Ronan treated Adam like a person to be trusted and believed in.

“Okay what?”

“Okay,” Adam said. “I believe you.”

“How fucking dandy for you.”

“No, don’t do that. You don’t get to do that. You’ve lead me along this entire time. Waiting for what? For me to solve the riddle of you?”

“You like riddles,” Ronan said.

“I like solving problems. I like putting things in order. What you’re presenting is not order, it’s chaos. It’s deciding the world isn’t bending enough to your will and then forcing it to do so. Imagine what would happen if everyone could do this.”

Ronan stood. He leaned against the post and dropped one foot off the step, swinging it behind him. “I don’t have to imagine it, I see it. Everywhere, all of the time. That’s why Declan went to law school. That’s why Gansey and Blue go on their ridiculous trips to forests that need protecting. And that’s why you’re here. You don’t like it when helpless things get hurt. You said that to me an hour ago. No one who wasn’t a hurt, helpless thing themselves would worry about that.”

Adam winced, because that stung. He had told Ronan next to nothing about his life and Ronan had seemed to pick up on a lot of what he wasn’t telling him anyway. “Ronan, it’s been a long night. If you don’t have any other life altering confessions to make I’d like to go home and go to bed.”

Ronan took several careful steps toward him, circling wide like a wolf might with something it was curious about but didn't quite understand yet. “You can stay here. I have a bed.”

Adam raised an eyebrow and Ronan went splotchy in light shades of pink from his ears down to his neck.

“I meant that we have guestrooms, asshole.” Ronan shooed Chainsaw off his shoulder and the bird flew about the porch and clipped Adam on the cheek with her wing before heading out into the blue mid-morning sky.

“Thanks, really. But I’ll just get out of your hair.” Adam bent to retrieve his bag. He checked his phone for the time, only to remember that it had died hours ago. “I’ll see you next week.”

It was not a question. It was a promise.

“I count on it,” Ronan said.

That was also a promise.

~*~

The next Sunday Adam completed his rounds of the Barns without seeing another person. It wasn’t uncommon for Ronan to make himself scarce, but the lack of Matthew made Adam worry. He finished up, put his bag back in his truck, and went in search of a Lynch brother.

Adam checked the moa pen first and found Ronan there with the creature’s head in his lap. He was bent over her, just as he had been the week before, but the hunch of his shoulders was relaxed and there wasn’t any sharp, angry worry on his face. He didn’t seem to want to say anything, so Adam worked around him. He smoothed his hands across the great bird’s breastbone and parted its feathers to check the skin for coloring. He didn’t know how to make the bird better, but he was still invested in its well-being.

When he finished he sat down on the hay covered ground next to Ronan and rapped his knuckles against Ronan’s knee. “I think she’s gonna make it.”

“There was a year or so there,” Ronan said. “Back when my father died, when everything I dreamed was sick from the beginning. Or was a monster. Like I was purging all of my pain through the things I dreamed.”

“Ronan, that sounds awful.”

Ronan nodded. “It was. It’s not like that anymore, so when she got sick I didn’t know why it was happening. I’m not upset, not like I used to be. There was no cause. Anyway, you work miracles.”

Adam didn't believe what he'd just heard. _He_ worked miracles? Here was proof that magic was real. Here was a man who pulled living animals from his dreams, who cared for his brother, who loved his friends. Here was a man who managed to run a farm more or less by himself which, while it was maybe cheating a little because the animals had different and less strict needs than real ones, was still a feat.

“I don’t think I’m the miracle worker here,” he said.

“You healed Dawn with nothing, with just your hands.” Ronan held his own hands up in front of him and spread his fingers so he could inspect the palms.

Adam placed his hands in his lap and clasped them together, hiding the evidence. “I did what I’d do for any creature who was sick. I have to try, even when it seems impossible.”

“You seem to like the impossible,” Ronan said. Then, as if the two thoughts went together he said, “You flinch sometimes, when Matthew grabs you.”

This observation surprised Adam, because he hadn’t realized that Ronan paid that much attention to them, but of course he did. Ronan was always paying attention. Adam didn’t know quite what to say in response to that. The long answer was fraught with many stories that were entirely too heavy to lay on this fragile thing that he thought might be happening.

“I do that sometimes,” he replied.

“Can I touch you?” Ronan asked.

“Sure,” Adam said. He held his hand out.

Ronan reached for him and circled his fingers loosely around Adam’s right wrist. For a few long moments he just sat like that, lightly touching Adam in a way that Adam had given his permission to be touched. Then he pulled Adam’s hand up to his face and turned it this way and that, examining it as if he was looking for a marker of some secret magical power.

Adam had been accused of being magic before, but really, any miracles he worked came about through determination and sheer force of will. If determination could actually be turned into magic Adam would have found his way to Narnia by the time he was eight. Instead he was still in Virginia and still living a life that was a hell of a lot of work, but that had led him to someplace wondrous all the same.

Ronan closed Adam’s hand up between his own graceful, calloused hands and the warmth the action lit a small spark of desire inside of Adam.

Adam was currently more or less alone, but he had not been alone his entire life. He’d had girlfriends and boyfriends, co-workers and classmates. He’d consented to let a great many people touch him in intimate and common ways, but very few of them had ever asked for that consent. Often it was subtextual, because of some unspoken mutual understanding. Sometimes it wasn’t and he had to handle that as best he could. This though, this was an entirely new experience, as so many of his experiences at the Barns had been.

“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you,” Ronan said, his voice quiet but clear.

“You said that before,” Adam said. “Where’s it from?”

“Bible,” Ronan replied.

“You don’t go to church with your brothers,” Adam observed. “Do you believe?”

“Don’t need to go to church to believe,” Ronan said gruffly. “Besides, I already know what God thinks of me.”

“And what’s that?”

Ronan tightened his grip on Adam’s hand and then let go. He pulled away and put his hands back on the bird, stroking her neck and keeping himself busy. “I do things I shouldn’t be able to do. I like doing them. I want people I shouldn’t want and I like that too. God and I have long ago come into an agreement where we leave each other alone. Declan couldn't leave anything alone if his life depended on it, so I hear all of the time exactly how disappointing I am.”

“Declan’s an asshole,” Adam said, confident in this assessment even though he’d only met him a handful of times over the months.

“True,” Ronan said.

“Gansey?” Adam asked, taking a shot in the dark.

Ronan coughed out a loud bark and the moa jerked underneath his hands and sat up, shying away from them. “Sorry girl,” he muttered. To Adam he said, “Yeah, for a while. Gansey’s, he’s my best friend. He was there for me when no one else was and he’s put up with a lot of shit. But unfortunately he goes in more for the big-mouthed, angry, girly type.”

The air in the small hut seemed to become thicker and warmer in a matter of seconds. Adam took a deep breath. His whole body was a riot of pulse points aching to be touched again and his mind was in overload. He stared down at his empty palms.

The realization of how he wanted to fill them pounced on him suddenly and sent his mind reeling. From day one he had coveted this place and Ronan’s arrogant attitude and the way Ronan moved through the world. What must it be like, he had thought over and over to himself as he lay in bed at night, to own a body and feel utterly comfortable in it? Now, as he sat and ached to reach out and take Ronan’s hand again he knew for certain that it was not Ronan’s certainty he coveted, but Ronan himself. He’d spent the last week getting used to having love for Ronan, but loving and wanting were two different things.

Adam turned the thought of them together over in his mind. “His loss,” he said finally.

“Doesn’t he know it,” Ronan replied. He held his hand out again and Adam took it. Ronan closed his fingers around Adam’s and tugged on his hand, pulling him forward until Ronan could kiss him.

Adam didn’t move to touch Ronan anymore than they were already touching. He wasn’t sure he would be able to handle it. He already felt like he might short circuit. His brain was in overload and his heart was pounding in his chest.

Ronan’s lips were soft against Adam's for the space of three heavy breaths and then they were gone. Ronan kissed the palm of Adam’s hand and then let go of his fingers, sitting up straight and giving Adam room to breathe and think.

Adam wasn’t sure he was capable of doing either. Ronan watched while Adam pulled himself back together. Adam stood and wiped his jeans off with his shaking hands.

“You’re right about me,” he said. “I do like the impossible.”

“Everyone has their thing, man,” Ronan said.

“Right, uh, do you need anything else from me? Before I go?”

Ronan tilted his head and smirked. “I’m sure I could think of a thing or two.”

“ _Ronan._ ” Adam clutched his hands to his stomach. God, why wouldn’t they just stop shaking? It wasn’t as if he’d never wanted someone before. It wasn’t as if no one had ever wanted him. No one like Ronan had ever wanted him, though, and that was making all the difference.

“No," Ronan said. "It can wait.”

“Okay,” Adam said. “Okay. I’ll uh, see you.” He gave a quick, unsteady wave, and then left the small stable, stumbling back into the bright afternoon sun.

He’d just rounded the shed on the way back to his truck when Matthew startled him by showing up out of nowhere and grabbing him by the elbow. Matthew looked around like he was in a spy movie and led Adam around the front of the house. The Lynch brothers were well and truly going to be the death of them.

“Is everything okay?” Adam asked.

Matthew’s puffer fish flitted about his shoulders, half inflated and in an obvious state of anxious restlessness. Matthew, for his part, only smiled calmly and let Adam go. “Yep,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”

“Right,” Adam replied, not believing it for a moment.

“I need to ask you a favor,” Matthew said.

“Anything,” Adam said. “When have I ever told you no?”

“You tell me no all the time,” Matthew whined, but the puffer fish deflated just a bit. “Anyway, I’m going away next week, with Declan. He’s taking me to DC to look at colleges.”

“That’s wonderful,” Adam said. “There are some really good schools around there.”

Matthew looked over his shoulder. When he spoke again it was in a stage whisper. “I know, but I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to leave Ronan alone. It’s why I haven’t gone to college yet even though I graduated high school a few years ago.

“Matthew, you can’t think Ronan would want you to hide away here and not have a life because of him.”

“No,” Matthew said, shaking his head. “He just wants me to be happy. And I am mostly, so he hasn’t pushed. Declan, though. Declan is always pushing.”

“I've noticed. I assume that’s why they don’t get along.”

“That’s one of the reasons. Declan says I shouldn’t worry about Ronan. He says if Ronan didn’t want to be alone he’d have stopped being such an asshole a long time ago.”

Adam thought it was very likely that, in this instance, Declan was right. He also thought that Ronan's attitude and demeanor were a defense reflex, and considering his growing desire for Ronan just as he was, he wasn't going to say that he agreed with Declan out loud.

“Anyway,” Matthew said. “You know how Ronan is.”

“Do I?” Adam asked.

Matthew stared at Adam for a long moment. “Don’t play dumb. I think you know better than most people, because he wants you to know.”

“That’s possible.” Adam wondered if Matthew and Ronan didn’t share the same sort of mental link that Ronan seemed to share with his animals. Matthew always ended up knowing more than he was initially willing to let on.

“It’s more than possible,” Matthew said. “Just, please promise me you’ll check in on Ronan next weekend, even though you don’t have to come back for another two weeks. You know, since you never _have_ to come.”

It was true. Ronan had been saying as much from the start. Adam didn’t have to come, but he always did. The animals didn’t need him, but he liked to feel like he was useful anyway. Somewhere along the way he’d gone from looking after the animals to looking after the brothers and after himself by proxy.

“Of course I’ll come.” Adam laid a hand on Matthew’s shoulder as a gesture of assurance and the puffer fish glided across his fingers and up his arm. “As long as it means you spend less time thinking about him and more time thinking about your future. Deal?”

“Deal!”

Matthew fell forward and hugged Adam tight about the waist. He pressed his face into Adam’s shoulder and the puffer fish lighted in Adam’s hair. Adam slowly reached around and gently patted Matthew on the back, not sure of how long this was going to last. Knowing the Lynch brothers was turning into a full contact sport. They were definitely going to be the death of him. Or maybe just the death of the part of him that wanted to reach out and never seemed to know how.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The alternate chapter title here is 'In which KL types about feelings for ~5,000 words and nothing much happens.' I know it wasn't an exciting one, but it was all necessary to get them to the end. Thanks for your patience with all of this. One chapter and two more pieces of lovely art to go!


	5. In which there is acceptance.

“I have something for your window,” Henry said.

Henry was doing that thing where he projected his excitement by making enough noise for two people and not paying enough attention to his surroundings. He bumped into one of the lounge chairs and it skid across the floor and banged loudly against the table where Adam was sitting. Adam reacted contrarily by very purposefully not looking up from his book, which was a strange and beautifully illuminated text outlining the history of unicorns in western Europe that Gansey had loaned him. He slid his finger down the page so he could keep his place while he took notes on the possible herbal remedies for magical strains of equine thrush.

“I keep telling you,” he said. “It’s not my window.”

Henry sat down across from Adam at the table. “Right, not your collection of pretty things. It belongs to all of us. Or whatever. Anyway, here.”

 _Not his collection of pretty things_ was exactly how Adam liked to think of the windowsills in the clinic break room. Some of the things on the windowsills were his. The geode Blue had found on the picnic was there, along with a blacker than night onyx stone Chainsaw had dropped into his hand on one of his farm visits. Most of the things on the windowsills were bits of broken beauty that had been gifted to the clinic by both Chainsaw and the passenger pigeon over the last several months. These were things that the other staff had found prettily arranged on the front mat or set reverently on the outside sills, glinting in the afternoon sun.

Some of the things had been delivered directly to Noah and suited his sensibility, such as the sparkling golden pyramid shaped rock and the large clear marble with the spiral galaxy twisting through the middle of it. Most of the things had probably been meant for Adam, but since Adam wasn’t there to collect them when they were found he could claim plausible deniability about the whole thing, which he was doing both internally and externally.

Adam could take these things home, but that seemed like a step towards acceptance of the whole situation that he wasn’t ready to make. That would mean inviting the beauty and the magic to have a part in his everyday life. Inviting in the magic meant inviting in Ronan, and Adam still wasn’t sure he was capable of acknowledging what Ronan had given him because he wasn’t sure he was capable of giving anything like it back.

It had been a full week since Ronan kissed him and Adam hadn’t so much as texted to discuss it. He was afraid—afraid that Ronan would want to discuss it, afraid that Ronan would want to do it again, afraid of how much he wanted Ronan to do it again. Who was Adam to deserve all of this, anyway? At least here at the clinic many people got to see how pretty these things were, and wasn’t that what beauty was _for_?

Henry rapped his knuckles on the table and Adam lifted his head to examine the small stone next to his hand. It was polished to a shine and layered with stripes of reds and pinks and beiges. It looked like a desert sunset.

“That’s nice,” he said, because it was. “You can just put it wherever.”

“You have to touch it first,” Henry said.

Adam sat up straight and put his pencil down. “Why?”

“So that it becomes yours.”

“Why does it matter who it belongs to?”

Henry let out a loud, exaggerated exhale. “Because I didn’t get it so I could benefit from it. I wanted the courage to be yours.”

Adam frowned. He had courage. He’d made it this far, hadn’t he? Even when the world seemed to not want to give him a break? He’d always pushed past the expectations of his parents and teachers and friends. He’d built himself from the ground up and meant to keep going. How much more courage could a man need?

“I don’t need any extra courage.”

“Relax,” Henry said, pushing the stone closer. “It’s not meant as a slight.”

“Then how is it meant?”

Henry tilted his head and looked Adam up and down in his seat. “My halmeoni used to complain about people praying for her when she was sick,” he said. “Said it was a waste of their precious time and that the world would be a better place if everyone would just get on with their own lives.”

“Your halmeoni and I have that in common,” Adam muttered.

“The thing was,” Henry continued, deliberately speaking over Adam. “That she never said it to the people doing the praying. And I asked her one time, I said, halmeoni, if you want them to stop doing that thing, why don’t you just tell them to stop doing it? And she shook her head and told me that when someone prays for you, it’s not about you, it’s about them, and anyway, it never hurts to wring a little extra luck from the heavens where you can. What I’m saying here, Parrish, is that when people root for you it doesn’t actually hurt you, no matter what your pride thinks, and you should just shut up and let them do it, and also take their dumb rocks. You can pretend I’m covered in feathers, if that helps.”

“You still haven’t said why.”

Adam’s phone buzzed against the wooden table top. They both looked at it as the screen lit up to tell him he’d received a text message from _Lynch Farm_. Henry smiled. Adam’s phone buzzed again. Henry pushed his chair back and stood.

“You know why,” he said. He tapped the tabletop and exited the break room, leaving Adam alone.

Adam swiped his finger across the screen to bring up the texts. Ronan was inviting him to dinner that night, if he had the time. No pigeon and no pretense, just one man sending a text to another to ask him to dinner, the non-magical and old-fashioned way. Adam suddenly felt like every object in the room, from the baubles on the window sill to the book to Adam’s own phone, was too large and too bright. There was a second where Adam felt suffocated by all of it.

He didn’t want to go to dinner because he wanted to go to dinner too much. He wanted to say no, but he had promised Matthew that he’d stop by anyway and he never broke a promise. Adam picked up the rock and closed it up tight in his fist and then typed out his reply with his free hand.

_Is 7:30 okay? What should I bring?_

~*~

By the time Adam pulled up to the Barns the sun was just beginning to set. The stripes of red, orange, and yellow in the sky resembled the stone he’d slipped into the front pocket of his jeans. It dug into his thigh and kept him present whenever his thoughts threatened to take him away. He parked and climbed out of his car, grocery store baguette in hand. Adam stood for a long moment and took in the way the main house looked backlit by the marvel that was the sky. Months and months ago he had wanted to know what life was like behind the warmly lit windows. Now he knew and he was having a hard time reconciling it with the want that still gnawed away at him.

“Onward and upward,” he said to himself. He took a deep breath and started up the yard.

The front door proper was wide open, but the screen door was closed, so Adam knocked on it and waited. After a few moments Destroyer came to the door and nudged it open with her nose. Adam opened it the rest of the way and stepped inside, trying to pet her head as she tried to lick his hands. Neither of them was fully successful.

“Is that you?” Ronan called from the kitchen.

“Depends on who you is supposed to be,” Adam called back. “But I like to think I’m me!”

“Asshole!” Ronan barked. “Get in here and bring my wolf with you.”

Adam closed the screen door gently behind him and stepped through the mudroom into the kitchen. Destroyer moved past him and sniffed her way over to the table where she somehow managed to fold her considerable body up underneath it without toppling any of the chairs. Adam paused in the doorway and took in the scene.

There was Ronan, barefoot in blue jeans and a green flannel button up shirt that entirely hid his tattoo. He was stirring something in a large pot that had water sputtering over the edges. Chainsaw was perched on the back of one of the chairs tracking Ronan’s movements with her eyes. Destroyer crossed her front paws and rested her head on them, also keeping an eye on Ronan. Neither animal seemed overly confident in their owner’s ability to tame the bubbling, hissing cauldron. A burst of water slopped over the side and hit the floor with a splatter. Ronan cursed and jumped back.

This moved Adam to action. He placed the bread on the table, picked up the towel by the sink, and waved it at Ronan, hitting him in the side. Ronan scooted out of the way so Adam could pick up the pot. He moved it to the sink and very gently poured some of the water out, trying not to lose any of the noodles. The task was harder than he thought it should be. It was a large pot, but there were a lot of noodles.

“How many people are you making dinner for?” he asked.

“Just two,” Ronan said. “But I didn’t know how much you would eat.”

“It would take me a week to eat all of this,” Adam said. Really, if he was careful, he could make it stretch a week and a half.

“Well then, you’re welcome to come back tomorrow.”

Adam balanced the pot on the edge of the sink and tested one of the noodles by slurping it off the spoon Ronan had been using to stir them. He determined they needed more time so he put the pot back and turned the heat down a bit. Ronan stood next to him and stirred a smaller pot of red sauce that had splattered all over the stovetop. Adam could feel Ronan watching him out of corner of his eye.

It was incredibly warm in the Lynch kitchen with the twin flames flickering under the stove caps and Ronan stood right at Adam’s elbow, but it wasn’t oppressive like the warmth in the moa hut had been. This was something else. This was what Adam had always imagined dinner time was like for most people: calm, companionable, quiet. Ronan’s shoulder brushed Adam’s. Adam turned slightly so he could knock Ronan’s hip with his own. Ronan smirked and kept stirring the sauce.

Even though Ronan seemed determined not to mention the kiss, Adam could feel the ghost of it hanging between them. After a few minutes he fished another noodle from the pot and decided that would do. He flicked off the burner, reached down to place his hand over his front pocket so he could feel the rock through the denim, and turned so that he was facing Ronan.

“Ronan,” he said.

Ronan looked up from the sauce. “Yeah?”

Adam’s kiss was not as gentle as Ronan’s had been, but Ronan didn’t seem to mind. He put the spoon down and reached for Adam’s hips, holding him and kissing him back with a vim that Adam had anticipated but still wasn’t entirely prepared for. He met it with as much vigor as he could, pressing in close and chasing after the high of being desired.

Ronan broke away and kissed Adam’s jaw and the place just beneath his ear. “Is that a rock in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

Adam let out a breath of a laugh and pulled the stone out, holding it up for inspection in his open palm. “A little of both?”

Ronan looked it over and nodded, as if he knew exactly what kind of stone it was. Maybe he did. It seemed like the sort of thing Ronan would know. He closed Adam’s fingers over it and then turned back to the sauce, which was now bubbling and raining droplets over the stovetop again.

With the sauce finished, Adam drained the water from the noodles as Ronan set the table. Once everything was in place Ronan pulled one of the chairs out from under the table and got down on his knees. “Move you, big oaf,” he said, pushing at Destroyer’s side. “You hate being kicked and you know it.”

“You can leave her,” Adam said. “I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

“She won’t,” Ronan complained. He reached in, grabbed Destroyer around the neck in a bear hug, and slowly began to tug her out of her hiding place. “The minute we sit down she’ll decide she wants to be somewhere else. Which would be fine if she wasn’t the size of my fucking car, but as it is, she takes the table with her.”

“Do you feed her people food?” Adam asked.

“She’s like, twice my weight,” Ronan said. “I feed her whatever she wants.”

“Or course,” Adam said.

He reached over Ronan and nabbed the bread from the table. He tore off an end piece and dipped it in the sauce before getting down on his own knees next to Ronan and holding the piece of bread out in front of him.

“Here girl,” he said, shaking it a bit. “You know you want it.”

Destroyer licked her lips and stood up, tilting the table so that the silverware slid across it. She knocked Ronan over as she stretched to lick Adam’s face and then took the bread into her mouth in one bite, nearly taking some of Adam’s fingers in the process.

“Gross,” Adam said, wiping at the wet spot on his cheek with his shirt.

Ronan stood up and rubbed at his tailbone where he’d hit the floor. “You got off light. Sometimes when I do that she decides to take my whole arm.”

“That’ll grow back, right?” Adam asked, taking the hand Ronan offered him.

Ronan tugged Adam to his feet. “I think you have me confused with a starfish.”

“Ah, is that what that is? So many animals, you know. Hard to keep track.”

“Asshole,” Ronan said again, his voice rich with a fondness usually saved for Matthew or Gansey. He pulled Adam close and kissed him, then he pushed him away. “Eat.”

They dished food onto their plates and sat opposite each other at the table. Ronan placed a small plate of plain noodles in front of Chainsaw and she hopped down off the chair back to inspect them. Destroyer settled in next to Ronan’s chair. She placed her big head on the table next to his elbow and stared up at him. Together the three of them looked like a complete set, all a bit feral, but in a well-worn and loving way.

They ate without speaking, but the kitchen was still full of the sound of scraping forks, water dripping in the sink, Destroyer’s intermittent begging whines, and Chainsaw’s claws and beak scratching against table and plate. Adam didn’t mind this. He knew that Ronan had never been big on using up words he didn’t have to and Adam had never considered himself a great conversationalist. Though, at the moment his quiet came from having too much to say, not too little. He couldn’t stop looking at Ronan and Ronan kept looking back. He cursed the table between them and the ingrained manners that kept him on his own side of it.

“Does it hurt?” he asked, finally finding the words for the tail of the thought whipping around his head.

Ronan raised an eyebrow. “What? Falling from heaven?”

“Jerk. You and I both know that’s not where you’re from.” Adam rolled his eyes and tossed a piece of bread at Ronan. It bounced off his shoulder onto the floor and Destroyer went after it. “No, when you make them.”

“Not usually,” Ronan said. “I just...wake up with them, sort of. I don’t do the creating, the dream does. I just tell it what I want.”

“Except for when you don’t.”

“Except for when I don’t.”

Adam was still settling into the idea of magic as much as he was settling into the idea of Ronan wanting him. Ronan’s nonchalance about both things was comforting. Adam appreciated the steady, matter-of-fact way in which Ronan talked about the wonder of it all, as if it was all old hat, just another thing that happened in the world the way the sun rose and set. Adam supposed that for him it was.

“That’s incredible,” Adam said.

Ronan shrugged. “It is what it is. It used to really suck, before I could control it. Sometimes when I made things they were hurt, or they hurt me, or both.”

Adam nodded. He was very familiar with how the past sometimes hurt. “Why did you keep doing it? If it hurt, I mean.”

“Because it made Matthew happy.”

Adam thought about that and tried to weigh out his next question carefully. “No, I mean, you said that before, but I don’t think that’s all of it, is it? You love Matthew so you want him to be happy, but you said you loved them as well. Why?”

Ronan looked down and pushed his few remaining strands of noodles around on his plate, building up a circular barrier of red sauce along the outside edge. “Don’t you love other things that are like you? When you see yourself in something, doesn’t that make you want to take care of it?”

“I don’t know,” Adam said.

It was a more honest answer than he’d ever given anyone. He sometimes felt strongly protective of children who seemed to be going through what he had, but he also sometimes just felt extremely tired at the thought of all those other Adam Parrishes. It would be impossible to fix them when he couldn’t even work out how to fix himself. He didn’t want them to hurt, but he didn’t know what to do about it.

“You called me a hurt, helpless thing once,” he reminded Ronan, which was as close as he thought he could get to an answer without vomiting. Vomiting was decidedly not desirous activity.

“I was being a dick,” Ronan said. “I do that.”

“I noticed, but listen, that’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s it. I think I just thought that, if I could give these creatures good lives, these extraordinary and lonesome creatures, that I could have that too. That I’d have proof it was possible and a reason to go on.”

“And?”

Ronan put his fork down. He looked up again and met Adam’s eyes. “And the jury’s still out, but things are looking promising.”

Adam could accept that. “Are you finished?”

Ronan nodded and pushed his plate away. Adam rose and took both of their plates from the table. He scraped them into the trash and then rinsed them off in the sink. Ronan got up and started opening cabinets so he could find containers to put the leftovers in. Destroyer paced the kitchen as they worked, bumping into them and begging for scraps. Ronan was wiping down the stovetop with a wet paper towel when he said something Adam didn’t catch over the sound of the water running in the sink.

He turned it off. “What?”

Ronan leaned in and scrubbed at a stubborn spot. “I said I’m sorry.”

Adam shook his head, worried he’d missed something more. “What for?”

“I’m sorry if I scared you. With Dawn I mean. I didn’t want to make you feel like you owed me anything, I just.” He gave up and dropped the wad of sodden paper onto the stain in disgust. “I was in awe. There’s magic in you. I can feel it. I have from the start. I guess like just calls to like.”

“No,” Adam said. “There’s really not.”

“You...thrum,” Ronan said, trying out the word as if he wasn’t sure it was the one that he wanted. “Like the dreams do sometimes.

Adam knew what Ronan meant. His whole body was thrumming right now just wanting to be close to Ronan again, but that was different. That wasn’t magic, that was just what bodies did. “Nah, just cussed stubbornness and some misplaced hope.”

“Hope is a kind of magic,” Ronan said.

“You think so?” Adam asked.

Ronan ran his fingers across the counter as he moved in close to Adam. When he met him at the sink he swung around and rested his other hand against the counter as well, so that Adam was caught between his arms. Ronan was being slow and careful, but Adam had had just about enough of slow and careful for a while. He wrapped his arms around Ronan’s waist and pulled him in close and barely registered when the water from the counter started to soak into the back of his shirt. He craned his neck up to try and kiss Ronan, but Ronan tilted his head back, a smug smile on his lips.

“I know so,” Ronan said, and then leaned in so Adam’s lips could have his.

Every part of Adam that touched Ronan felt new, like the riotous blossoming flowers went through in the spring. He arched into Ronan, trying to get as much of that feeling as he could. Ronan responded by running his hands around Adam’s back and up under his shirt. His fingertips left a trail of heat in their wake that Adam wished would just consume him.

Ronan slid his hands down to Adam’s hips and tugged as he stepped back, walking him through the kitchen and into the living room where he collapsed onto the couch and pulled Adam down with him. Adam straddled Ronan’s lap, pushing him down into the cushions. He buried his face into Ronan’s neck, trying to catch his bearings and his breath again. It felt like the whole world had shifted to the left of where it had been twenty minutes before.

“Do you have anywhere to be?” Ronan asked, voice rough.

“Nope,” Adam said.

He kissed Ronan’s jaw, running his tingling lips along the stubble starting to grow in and relishing in the feel of it. He ran his fingers down Ronan’s chest and unbuttoned his shirt. Ronan let Adam push it over his shoulders and down his arms until it was off of him, then he pulled off his tank top as well and leaned back, waiting.

Adam looked down at Ronan and knit the pieces of him together in his mind: pale pale skin and anger worn as armour, wet red lips and sharp defensive tongue, bright blue eyes and deep black tattoo poised as if it might swallow the whole of him. He was just a man and he wasn’t. Ronan licked his lips and nudged the hem of Adam’s shirt up. Adam obliged him by tugging it over his head and dropping it onto the floor. Ronan ran an exploratory hand from Adam’s navel up to his neck. Adam looped his arms around Ronan’s shoulders and pulled him close so that he could look over the edge of his shoulders at his tattoo.

“Here,” Ronan said. He shoved gently at Adam’s hips and Adam slid off him onto the couch. Ronan turned sideways and pulled his knees up to his chest, hooking his chin over them so Adam could have an unobstructed view.

Adam’s breath caught in his throat. He’d wondered if the tattoo was fierce and beautiful and now he had his answer. It was more than he’d thought it could be, intricate and delicate, wicked and divine. There were demons and birds and roses and thorns, things that hurt and things that healed. It was easy to see that this is what Ronan thought of himself in both his moments of doubt and hubris. He reached out and ran his finger in a swirl of a line from the nape of Ronan’s neck down to the small of his back, following the arc of one of the vines.

Ronan inhaled sharply when Adam ran a finger across his spine. Adam leaned forward and wrapped his arms around Ronan’s chest. He kissed his way across the line the shoulders that he’d always seen as broad and strong. How much weight was on them? How much could Adam help with that?

“You’re so beautiful,” he said, with his lips pressed to the back of Ronan’s neck.

“Not bad yourself,” Ronan replied. He wriggled in Adam’s arms and turned until they were both on their knees, facing each other and testing each small part of skin they found with lips and tongues and hands.

Fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, an eternity later and Ronan asked, “Do you want to stay?”

The answer was yes. Adam never wanted to leave, but there were implications to staying that he wasn’t sure he was ready for. He wanted Ronan keenly and that wanting felt a bit like a betrayal to the safe, logical way he tried to behave. This was all so new. There were so many ways to screw it up and he didn’t giving in too soon to be one of them. He didn’t want to act on an impulse he wasn’t prepared to see through.

“Stop thinking so hard,” Ronan said. “Jesus, I can hear the gears grinding in your head. It’s not a proposal. Of any kind.”

“I don’t want to let go,” Adam said, because it was what he kept thinking over and over in his head as he ran his fingers across Ronan’s chest for the hundredth time. _I don’t want to let go. I don’t want to let go. I don’t want to let—_

“Then don’t,” Ronan replied.

He twined their fingers together and slid out from under Adam so he could stand up. Adam followed Ronan up the stairs and to one of the darkened bedrooms, holding tightly onto his hand the whole way. He had to let go to take his jeans off, but soon after that they were lying in Ronan’s bed—Ronan in only his boxer briefs and Adam in only his plain old boxers and socks—facing each other and not touching except for their hands.

“I,” Adam started.

“It’s fine,” Ronan whispered. “It doesn’t matter.”

He kissed Adam and Adam moved in close, not wanting to miss a single part of him. They were both hard, but except for moments when they caught against each other’s stomachs or hips and let out heavy sighs, neither of them moved to do anything about it. This wasn’t about that. Ronan had said it didn’t have to be and Adam believed him. So they overdosed on touching until kiss drunk and high on each other, their eyelids grew heavy and their lips grew lazy and they finally passed into sleep.

~*~

  


Adam woke up with his arm draped across Ronan’s waist and his face pressed into Ronan’s rib cage. He stretched and yawned. When he opened his eyes the first thing he noticed was how soft the morning light was as it came in through the gauzy white curtains. The second thing he noticed was that he and Ronan were not alone in the bed.

Ronan kissed Adam’s forehead and shoved the black ball of fuzz across his chest until its impossibly soft fur was tickling Adam’s nose. “What do you think we should call her?”

Adam blinked and took in the creature. It blinked its wide black eyes and stared back. “What is it?”

“Sugar glider maybe?”

Adam groaned and ducked his face beneath Ronan’s arm. “That is not a sugar glider. It feels like a chinchilla. And it’s also too early for naming things.”

“This is your life now, Parrish,” Ronan said, pulling his arm away and tucking it under his head so Adam didn’t have any place to hide. “Give her a name. Names are important.”

“Impossible,” Adam said. “Both of you.”

Ronan smiled and sat up. He cupped the creature to his chest with both hands. “He loves the impossible doesn’t he?” he asked the it.

It wriggled and stretched in reply and Adam saw that even though it looked like a chinchilla, it did indeed have little gliding stretches of skin like a sugar glider. Well, excellent. Chainsaw would no doubt teach this thing too to fly and dive bomb Adam when it didn’t get its way. It was painfully cute, though, and in spite of his better judgment he was already becoming attached to it.

“Fine,” he said, rolling onto his back and stretching again. “Yes, okay? I do not entirely hate the impossible. Give her here.”

“Imp it is then,” Ronan said. He deposited the animal onto Adam’s chest.

It curled up over Adam’s heart and closed its eyes. It looked like little more than an insubstantial ball of fluff, but it was warm and it was breathing. Adam gently ran his hand over its soft, soft fur.

“Did you ask for this one?”

“No,” Ronan said. “This is gonna sound stupid, because I’ve only had about ten minutes to think about it, but I think that’s just what happiness looks like.”

“Of course it does,” Adam said. “At least it doesn’t have fangs.”

“Oh, I won’t hold that against it.”

Ronan rolled onto his side and snuggled up close with his cheek on Adam’s shoulder. He rested his hand against Adam’s hip and lightly stroked small, slow circles across Adam’s skin with his thumb.

Adam didn’t know what happiness looked like, but he knew what he hoped it looked like. He hoped it looked like this: an impossible moment with an impossible man and his impossible magic. Adam believed in that hope with the whole of his heart, because that too was a kind of magic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * The internet tells me agates are for protection, calming, and courage. The internet also told Henry that. 
> 
> * And that's it! Thank you for reading. A million thanks to [purrsnicket](http://purrsnicket.tumblr.com/) for her patience and her wonderful art. It's honestly the only reason I actually wrote this thing and she made it so worth it. Please go shower her with love and candy.


End file.
